The Butchertown Chronicles: Draft 2, Slightly Nervous

THE LAST BULLET . . . .

Morning: The writer is preparing his upcoming novel for distribution and review to his select group of beta readers when nausea suddenly surges.

Who the hell wrote this crap? he grumbles, his mouth still crusted with sleep. Then he sighs: He knows the answer. Its whiskered visage stares back every morning from a spotted mirror.

A pent-up hiss whistles out his teeth. He moves on with his grim lonely work.

Butchertown, the writer’s novel, is far enough along that he’s decided to send it toddling around the block to see what the neighbors think. No matter the fear. No matter what they might do.

And believe it, he knows very well what they might do.

At night, the writer fears sleep, because there, underneath the black tarp, bad dreams lurk, portentous nightmares of dismal reviews:

“Former Local Hack Again Humiliates Hometown: School Council to Strike Burchfield’s Name from Records After Literary Effort Flunks Literacy Test”: Peekskill News Service

“If you’ve been waiting for a revival of the Roaring Twenties gangster novel, wait another ninety years. So bad, it’s the best advertisement for the re-institution of Prohibition I’ve ever read.”—Single Malt and Beer Monthly.

“It’s a shame bad books aren’t printed on paper anymore, otherwise I’d throw this latest crock by Burchfield right in the fireplace. Oh hell, guess I’ll take this hammer to my Kindle instead”—John Pilcrow, Pushcart Prize award winner (and real-life writer).

“Citing Burchfield Novel, Congress Unanimously Passes Censorship Law; Obama Promises to Sign. ‘We’ve Got to Do Something About This Flood of Bad Books!’ Says Speaker Boehner.”

The writer sincerely believes joking will help ease his anxiety.

That in itself is funny.

WHAT BUTCHERTOWN IS ABOUT

The writer now believes he can spill a little more about Butchertown, work up some anticipation among readers, both old and new.

The year is 1922, two years into the ruinous idealism known as Prohibition. The place: a highly fictionalized Northern California. The hero, Paul Bacon, a young up-and-coming junior assistant city attorney, glib fashion plate, and love-struck Lothario, ferries across the Bay one fogbound Friday evening, about to step out on the worst date of his life.

Through Butchertown’s frantic, bloody pages race dames sultry and devious, two motley gangs of trigger-happy mobsters, fatally obsessed Prohibitionists, two-fisted brawls, and hair-raising escapes down endless warrens of grimy alleys. The bullets fly, the bodies pile up. The air gets so hot, even water catches fire.

Somehow too, a love story flowers from the mud and grime, a good and offbeat one; or so the writer believes, the sap.

Butchertown fits in a number of genres: Roaring ‘20s shoot-’em-up, cat-n’-mouse thriller, fish-out-of-water story, noir mystery. Its roots lie in the crimson soil of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, sprinkled with the fizz and spectacle found in novels and stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Jazz Age writers and journalists; and maybe a tinge of Eric Ambler for its coiled viperous intrigue and the innocent soul who blunders into and through its treacherous landscape.

Butchertown in no way mocks or brushes away the laws of physics, but it is a kind of horror tale. But, as the meat-ax title implies, it serves up a brimming bowl of horror. The writer is even considering warning labels, and fears he may be forced to cover the eyes of anyone he sees reading it, yes, even those of Stephen King.

It may be a good sign that the writer is scared by his own book.

A FEW FRACTIONS MORE . . . .

The second draft of Butchertown comes to a mere 263 pages, around 77,000 words. The writer hopes to trim a few fractions more.

How did it come up so short this time? Simple: Butchertown is told from a single, first-person POV over one extremely harrowing weekend, from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. A single POV means tighter focus and less plot juggling.The reason why

Of course, shorter does not mean better, but as far as story and plot go, the writer experiences waves of pleasure with Butchertown.

Sometimes he actually says out loud (while alone), “The birth of my book is inherently more interesting and exciting than royal queenly people birthing babies or whatever it is they do over there.”

Yes, he is that self-obsessed—He doesn’t even care what they name the baby!

The writer bets that crime and suspense fans will especially like Butchertown because, out in the world, what the writer thinks matters little. Someone has to like his book besides him. Preferably lots of people. Lack of readership is no indicator of literary virtue either, crabby Bohos to the contrary.

As for bestsellerdom, like his pleasure-loving hero, the writer knows there are better odds at the race track. But he goes on writing anyway, for reasons that will remain mystifying as long as he lives.

As for more literary questions, there is the common quandary about to handle the plot. The setting seems vivid but the author is frankly undecided about how much of the real NorCal of the 1920s to use. As for literary matters of style—or non-bad writing--that’s for the final baking.

Whatever Butchertown’s current flaws, the writer thinks his book is good. That’s not a new thought. Now he needs some people to tell him whether or not it’s true and what he can do to make it even better.

And so he reaches out to those Lucky 7, those readers, both writers and not, to get their opinions and insights. You might well be one of them (yes, even you, vile Pilcrow!)

As a first-timer named Robert Galbraith recently found out, even great is not good enough. (The man got so desperate, the author hears, he’s started passing himself off as J.K. Rowling!)

The author strokes his mustache, then suddenly sits bolt upright, grabs his phone and dials:

“Steve . . . Steve King? Tom Burchfield here . . . say, I got this book comin’ out in a while and I’m wondering if you’d mind . . . you would? Great! I knew you’d be a pal!”

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by Elizabeth Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has just completed BUTCHERTOWN , a 1920s gangster shoot-'em-up. He can be “friended” on Facebook and tweeted at on Twitter. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The Butchertown Chronicles: First Draft

FINISHING

Around the first of September, my health shaky, my mind fluttering and befogged, I shuffled to the end of the first draft of my next novel Butchertown. I finished later than expected, figuring June or July. Didn’t happen.

Butchertown is a gangster thriller set in 1922 in a fictionalized West Coast city. First among its antecedents is Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Some may hear an echo of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire while others will sense the ominous thunder of the original The Untouchables TV series and the original Scarface. But whatever the echoes, I hope readers will forget them, as they’re pulled into its bloody torrent.

One quality of a great genre novel is that it gives the reader the illusory feeling that they’ve never read anything like it before, though they have many times. From my own experience, I think of Red Harvest, Ghost Story, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Among more recent books, The Sisters Brothers gave me that vibe. I hope readers will have the same experience with Butchertown.

The first draft of Butchertown runs a total of 231 pages and over 67,000 words. Those of you who were around during early Dragon’s Ark days will recall the first draft of that book topped 600 pages, around 170,000 words.

Butchertown’s page/word count represents quite a drop, but is easily explained. Dragon’s Ark was told from multiple viewpoints. The events stretched over a period of months. Butchertown, like many—maybe most—noir novels, is told in first person singular; further, its querulous events tumble across a compressed period of time, namely one really horribly long weekend and a day.

No worries about over length here. However, I do feel a little concerned with under length; with a writing a tale that comes off as an undernourished herky-jerky, Post-modern mashup of older, better books, rather like Tarantino movies at their most annoying.

Writing the draft went smoothly. (Then again, I wonder if that isn’t always the case. The words bubble and sizzle quickly up on the screen as I jam along, their true worth unnoticed until much later, when I see them, thin and lonely, stranded across bleak snowfields of paper.)

As I finished each chapter, I would read it aloud to my wife, Elizabeth, who, whatever her natural and correct biases, found the story to be a ripping, gripping page turner. That was the first thing I needed to know.

My pace slowed along with me when I fell ill in early July. I lived in gaps of thoughtless time, wobbling at the office door before retreating back to bed to the warm bliss of sleep and the sleek rectangle of my i-Pad. I even took to handicapping horse races just to keep the brain cells mindlessly churning. I hated the news and rejected all attempts at profundity.

Finally, as recovery slowly began and a wedding anniversary/recuperative vacation approached, some kind of closing appeared called for. The last two chapters floated up in the anemic pond of my miasma. I scooped them off the surface and poured them out.

When I returned home, I let the draft stew and simmer out of sight a couple of weeks more, as my body continued to heal. At the end of September, I printed it out in double-space, 12-point Roman and sat down at the dining nook table to read it over line by line, paragraph by paragraph.

RE-READING

As I predicted, writing the first draft was a lot more fun than reading it. I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop to wrestle and fuss over every tree, but instead read it for the forest; meaning for its general attributes such as flow, story, and the general cloth of its characters. I found, after a while though, that I couldn’t really keep that promise.

For one, those weedy details count for a lot: do I need that strand? Do I not? Do I need it here or elsewhere—this is especially a problem with crime clues. A mystery writer is always caught in the dilemma between giving away the game too soon or waiting too long so it looks he’s dumping a thousand rabbits out of his hat.

Further, filigree is not always merely filigree. A choice of neck scarf, an allergy to certain materials matter; even one’s choice of drink might be a life and death trigger. The stray detail, spit out, slapped down, considered useless suddenly becomes a thin but strong stand in the larger web, while another lovingly detailed and admired moment means nothing after all and is discarded with only a pang.

So, I slowed down, but not too much, dodging entanglements with the always absorbing details of adjectives, adverbs, and sentence structure. I swore a lot, left red slashes like Freddy Krueger, circled with question marks, and jotted down actual questions.

Sometimes all I could do was emit a self-forgiving sigh, mumble something about Shakespeare et al writing pages of absolute shit before getting it right. (I’m the only one who really has to smell it.) Then I moved on.

On many days, rereading and rewriting Butchertown is only a job like any other. Let no one call this romance. Ecstasy is brief and fleeting. Like the English say so aptly, “Well, get on with it then!”

BRIEF CONCLUSIONS

No, not an entirely pleasant experience. Though I think my story an excellent one, its tissue remains distressingly patchy in many places, especially toward the end, the Sick Section, as you might call it.

One thing I like very much is my protagonist, a fellow seldom seen in the back alleys of crime and thriller fiction nowadays. (Those who’ve read my criticism likely know my attitude toward contemporary genre heroes.) I’m already outlining a new adventure to maneuver him in to. By force, if necessary. “My characters,” a favorite writer of mine was known to say, “are slaves.”

My antagonists so far, are a colorful, meaty stew of femme fatales, trigger-happy lowlifes, thugs, and self-styled schemers, grimy and unwashed with one or two exceptions. There are two others characters whose appearances I hope surprise, as people like these don’t often appear in this genre (or are treated with any understanding.) Some characters are still much too scrawny, too much in the wallpaper and need to be brightened and beefed up, pushed into this small arena, into the bloody swirling chaos of Butchertown.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Every Writer Needs an Editor

A couple weeks ago, on a site where some successful mystery writers gather to talk shop, one contributor made an astonishing assertion: Novelists don’t need to hire—for pay—copyeditors to do a final review of their book. All they need to do is have the writers in their affinity group, be it website or writers group, copyedit their manuscripts as they’re passed around for review.

“So let’s start passing those manuscripts around RRRRIGHT NOWWWW!”

[Here, I lean out over the table, my hand raised in objection: “Excuse me! I have a problem with this!”]

First a couple of digressions: The writer in question—who shall go unnamed in this small town--has likely sold more books than I ever will. He’s also published by an established imprint, where, I presume, his books are copyedited in house.

(However, that may also not be true, as it’s said that more and more trad publishers are shouldering authors with the burden of hiring their own copyeditors, not to mention doing their own marketing, their own publicity . . . say, what is it you people do, anyway? Oh, you just collect most of the money. Oh, OK . . . .)

Secondly, as I am an independent author/publisher, the writer’s assertion that I can rely on a team of my fellow authors is a luxurious mistake none of us lone cowboys can afford to make.

I’m not saying this simply because, in addition to being a novelist, I’m an underemployed editor. (I don’t copyedit fiction, for reasons I’ll explain some other time.) If we have any pride in what we do, we want our books to be almost indistinguishable, from cover to colophon to comma, from the best that the Big Six have to offer.

As a novelist, I don’t want another novelist copyediting my novel, unless he’s already a professional copyeditor, and we have a business agreement where he will copyedit my novel. And I mean copyedit it. Not read and review as a fellow novelist and reader. I mean copyedit.

Because copyediting is different.

WHAT COPYEDITORS DO

I have been a copyeditor—professionally trained and certified through the University of California, Berkeley—for the last seven years.

Copyeditors are disinterested third parties. While we should have an affinity, or sympathy, for the genre a writer works in, or a keen interest in the subject matter, we are firstly technicians, craftspeople, grammar and language geeks who work mostly on the level of computer programmers and coders. Many of us write on the side, but when we copyedit, we are not writing. We employ a very different skill set. Our Inner Tolstoys are packed in away in a locked closet.

Are you the successor to Herman Melville? Or another hack with dreams of buying the mansion next door to Stephanie Meyers?

We don’t care. (Actually, I do care a little, which is part of the reason I don’t copyedit fiction.)

By the time a manuscript reaches us, the majority of it has, hopefully, been done: looked over by developmental editors, writing coaches, or an astute group of readers. Most of the factual, intellectual, and literary issues have been settled. (Sometimes they’re not. But that’s another issue and more money.)

Copyediting is a separate stage that ideally takes places just before the manuscript, usually done in Word, is sent to the interior designer to be converted in a published manuscript, using a program such as InDesign.

We strive to see that whatever style decisions have been made, they have been applied consistently throughout the book. We check your usage, spelling, and your grammar; your commas and your semi-colons. We check for continuity, sense, and flow.

Some paragraphs may need switching around, or broken up and rearranging. There may be lumpy redundancies here and there. Is your character bald as an egg on page 22 and then suddenly sprouting curly yellow locks on page 222? Have you given her a sudden gender change? (And then back again?) Your plot gets muddled and confused on page 158. Did you know that manzanita trees don’t grow in Delaware? It’s your last chance, chum!

We’re here to catch things like that, goofs that all writers make. Count the author of Dragon’s Ark—me, a copyeditor—as chief among those goof-makers. When this copyeditor writes a novel, he wants a copyeditor who is not the guy in the mirror to do the copyediting.

WHAT I DID AND WHY

When I submitted my third draft of Dragon’s Ark to my readers, I specifically asked them not to copyedit, not to sweat those little, though essential, details. I asked them to the look at the forest and not squint at the trees, the leaves, the bark, the roots, and the loam from which the roots draw their nourishment. I wanted them to look at larger, broader things and I believe Dragon’s Ark was a better book for it.

When I read a draft of another writer’s novel, I read it the same way: for its literary qualities; for its characterizations, setting and action; for pleasures it provides and pleasures missing; for how closely it fulfills the writer’s goals and what he might do to get it there. (I mean, I’m reading this book for free anyway.)

Only after all comments had been returned and digested and I’d finished my final draft, did I hire a copyeditor, that disinterested professional, to look out for those many, small, last details.

How did that work out? Well, next time I have to be more careful in my search and be willing to spend more money . . . because, with few exceptions, quality costs more.

Despite the cost and difficulties, I don’t see what benefits I would have accrued by having my beta readers also copyedit my book. To ask an author-colleague to take on the specifically technical act of copyediting (for free, no less), would have been, at best, insulting to him and likely end in something less than what it should be.

First off, few writers are professional copyeditors. And of those who are, few of us would be willing to look at the same manuscript with two different pairs of glasses, especially at the same time. I know I wouldn’t. No matter how much I love you.

Further, having several writers putting in their dime on comma placement on one book can only end in confusion and fatal inconsistency. Those commas and connectives matter. You may not notice them consciously, but your unconscious does and it affects your experience of the book.

It takes one set of eyes, one mind, to achieve that necessary consistency. Editors differ in their styles to start with, so setting a bunch of them loose on my manuscript would have made a mash ending in a confusing reading experience. A single copyeditor may make some errors, but more copyeditors will only make more errors. One copyeditor per book, take my word for it.

I would never ask any fellow novelist, no matter how intense our mutual admiration, to copyedit my book, for love nor money. Hell, I wouldn’t ask Nabokov if I had the chance (and I’d run and hide behind the Moon if he even offered). I don’t want a writer to edit. I want an editor to edit.

And should a fellow novelist should ask me to copyedit his book, I’m likely to give him my snakiest bullet-eyed stare as I calmly open my hand: “When I’m paid . . . .”

Because I don’t edit for free. I need to be paid. We all do. (And, again, I don’t copyedit fiction.)

And so, when it comes time to copyedit your book, by all means, pay the fifteen (hundred) dollars. Your novel will be better for it, whether you’re Melville or Meyers.

Photo by author.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield
Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Strong Opinion

I guess I won’t be moving into that chateau on Lake Como next door to George Clooney anytime soon.

I mean, I’d sure love to have genre writer James Patterson’s money. But I doubt I’d enjoy having to keep up his fertility rate. When I think about his huge output, I hearken back to my early years spent lugging fifty-pound boxes of paper around San Francisco law firms. O simple joys of youth!

Those of you who read The New York Times may have seen the article last week describing the new paradigm for ultra-super-bestselling genre authors like Patterson. Nowadays, writers are now being pressed to produce—I might not call it writing, precisely—two books a year. Plus short stories.

“The culture is a great big hungry maw,” said Lisa Scottoline, another mega-best-selling thriller writer, “and you have to feed it.”

(Full disclosure: I haven’t read either Mr. Patterson’s or Ms. Scottoline’s work.)

This requirement is said to be a feature of the e-book era. With readers now able to download anything, anytime they want, it’s believed that an author has to stay in the reading public’s pupil 24/7. This is based on the theory of signal-to-noise ratio, which, in a certain frame, makes a good deal of sense, at least economically.

This has led me to think again about what kind of readers I want to reach.

Most habitual genre fiction readers want escape, clean and simple. Perhaps they’ll tolerate a thematic nod to their value systems, whether “conservative” or “liberal,” and some pop-psychobabble, but beyond that, the vast majority of genre fiction readers want nothing thematically challenging, innovative, or overly offbeat, no matter how entertaining it might otherwise be.

Then, there is an apparent minority of picky readers, like me. As someone said to me, there’s reading to escape and there’s reading to grow. And while I prefer novels that take me into other worlds, I like it when the journey not only alters my sight and gives me new perspectives, it illuminates the world I’m in now, that touches on the “human condition.” I read to both grow and be entertained.

Most genre novels and stories aren’t nearly so ambitious as to bridge those two landfalls, but a remarkable number can. I count John le Carrê, Peter Straub, among others, as examples. It takes time to write books like these. That’s the table I want to sit at as a writer. And so, I can’t hope to write two books a year. At least good ones, as I understand them.

Back in the old days, of paperback originals and hardcover novels that would made their real big score in paperback editions, genre masters like Rex Stout and Luke Short would craft a book a year, maybe two if they were feeling frisky or the butcher was giving them the hairy eyeball. Maybe they weren’t Hammett-level innovators, but they were unmistakably talented, gifted writers, who nevertheless, must have grown bored churning out the same book with the same formula or characters year after year.

Believe me, at times, I can hear Rex Stout’s fingers falling like a lead hammer on the typewriter keys and his heavy sighs as he types “The doorbell rang” for the one-thousandth time; I can sense when the champagne rapport between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin loses its fizz; or I’m almost sure that Stout used almost the exact same mystery plot ten books ago, except the murder weapon was a pitchfork instead of a harpoon and . . .  well . . . .

After a while, an understanding develops. No writer—literary or genre--writes only good books. All my favorite writers have written novels that fall short for me.

One critic—I think a New Yorker writer--recently wrote that when we say we love a writer, what we mean is that we love, at most, fifty percent of his work. So long as you sense an author’s always striving to be his Best Self, that other fifty percent--well, no one’s a genius all the time and those valleys can make the peaks look all the grander. And if that fifty percent dross starts drifting toward ninety, you gently close the door and search elsewhere.

Snobby as I am, I’m also a literary anarchist. By this I mean, I can like anything . . . so long as it’s good, whether it’s the best Luke Short western or the eye of Vladimir Nabokov’s young poet opening to the world while gazing out over 1930s Berlin. The reality is that there are more good books than I will ever be able to read.

So, I’m wondering, just what is it that fans of Mr. Patterson and Ms. Scottoline expect to get with their high productivity demands? I’m not talking about literature, either. Having to grind out two full novels a year, means there’s hardly enough time or space for craft or professionalism. Whether you’re Lee Child or Thomas Pynchon, it takes time to write a decent book. Followed by a nice vacation.

Remember the hubbub over the length of time George R.R. Martin took to finish his latest Song of Ice and Fire epic, Dance of Thrones? Some of Martin’s “fans” were--no “upset” is too mild a word—pissed off with scalding, flaming vomit that the next book had failed to be completed by their timetable. “We demand that you pander to us! We demand a stinking, unreadable tower of shit!”

Neil Gaiman was right: “George Martin is not your bitch!” I second that motion, as do most of us writers. The only sin is writing lazily, writing badly (and releasing it), writing like you don’t care, writing to keep your “fans” from condemning you on Facebook.

Now, James Patterson fanboy, come sit on my knee so ol’ Grandpa can dispense some advice: You know, while waiting a year or so for Mr. Patterson to write and publish another novel, why don’t you take a breath, broaden the ol’ horizons and read some other genre writers?

There are plenty of worthwhile books worth your time. I will even boldly suggest you read my (IPPY prizewinning) Dragon’s Ark, while you wait for Mr. Patterson to write a good book. I mean that’s what you really want, isn’t it? A good James Patterson book?

I know I don’t want, for example, a bad Peter Straub book. I know that if I start sleeping on the doorstep of his Manhattan brownstone and fire-bombing his Twitter account with demands for Ghost Story XXII, he’d be well within his right to tell me to go have airborne relations with rolling holed pastry.

I don’t say this because I worship the dust around Mr. Straub’s feet. I say this because I do what he does. And it’s hard to do well. I can do it badly, I can publish a napkin a day, but I don’t want to and the kind of readers I want—those fussy readers--don’t want me to either. They’ll want the best I have to give and that’s what I’ll try to do, even though I fully know I won’t always be able to.

I took four years to write (IPPY Award Winning) Dragon’s Ark. I’m first to admit that’s too much time for such a book. Happily, I’ve absorbed the lessons I learned so that my next book Butchertown, started in August of last year, is galloping like a thoroughbred and should be out by the end of this year—a little more than a year and, even more importantly, done with my very best effort.

While you’re waiting, look at that long list of writers on the side of this page. They’re good writers, all of them. Some of them are Olympian highbrows, some of them first-rate entertainers, writing artful, sophisticated tales of adventure, suspense, and hair-raising horror and thrills. New or old, they deserve your valuable reading time. There’s no hurry. You’ll never read all their work and you don’t need to.

As for James Patterson and Lisa Scottoline, I hope they have time to enjoy their chateaus, wherever they are.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Shop Talk #5: Slow, Shaky Surgeon

I finished draft #3 of the formerly-titled The Vampire of Alpine Canyon (now called Dragon’s Ark )on February 28, 2001 and have finally grown the stones to—just kidding, it was 2008, like you remember. I didn’t shamefully hide it away like I did Mazola Party Platter that mega-hardcore porn video I produced in the 1990s—Oh! I never told that story!? Never mind!

I last discussed this book in “The Back Trails of Research” (9/16/07). This time, I have the following facts to report:

1) Draft #3 came in at 582 pages, down a pitiful 36 pages from draft #2 to around 161,000 words. Not even within cannonball distance of my goal. Am I a failure? Only if I quit.

2) My writing skills are now at the level of Harold Robbins’ Late Period (say, The Betsy). Don’t break out those ABAs yet. I keep clearing away webs of plot, story and awful writing. For example, the “vampire hunter,” still lacks forward momentum and takes too long wandering in and out of too many box canyons and dead-end trails. Until recently, I mushed around about the name of a significant geographical feature, but I think it’s settled now.

As with draft #2, once finished, I immediately set #3 aside to simmer and to fantasize about my guaranteed great success: I saw numbers so high that, to steal one from David Mamet, “dogs can’t hear it.”

But, before floating into my fantasy of how you’re all gonna buy this book or be struck blind, I made seven copies (with the assistance of my Wife’s Sister and Brother-in-Law) and gave each copy to seven selected readers (including Wife and Wife’s Sister). Some of them know each other, but others are mutual strangers. Some readers are also writers, while some are readers only: These minds are open to sheer pleasure, free from the technical worries that clutter the heads of all writers. The only thing the readers all have in common for sure is that they—I hope—read these postings.

I gave them three weeks to pound through it—no agonizing over every line and page—and asked them to focus on the book’s entertainment value: What bored them? What confused them? We like praise, yes—in fact, we need it--but learning what’s wrong is the path to keeping this one out of Border’s pulping pile.

Sometimes, “This part bored me to diarrhea, this part nearly gave me a heart attack and why don’t your characters stop changing clothes in the middle of every scene?” is all I need. Sometimes I’m only looking for confirmation of my sense that something isn’t working and maybe I’ll stumble on the reason why and—most important—how to fix it! For these issues, non-writing readers work best.

Best of all, non-writers don’t try to righteously rewrite your book the way they’d write it, a painful experience, especially when dealing with someone who’s prone to bellowing: “Fuck Shakespeare! I’m a Dean Koontz man!”

So, why aren’t I in a writer’s group?

For years, I was. In fact, I joined too many.

Once, I briefly joined a writer’s group who claimed that they read the fiction they produced solely from the point of view of “real everyday readers.”

“But that, of course, is bullshit,” as Charles Willeford so eloquently puts it.

Readers do not read like writers do, as noted above and no way can writers read like non-writers. For example, I study Elmore Leonard as closely as I read Cervantes, though I read each book in a very different manner, as I’ve lectured elsewhere. Whether it’s Ulysses or Butcher’s Moon, I’m always a writer reading. We writers process our reading in very different ways. We study the nails, the glue, the wood, and how it's cut, rather than pouring it into our heads, letting the words gush through ours souls. For us, even the most pleasurable reading is still work.

The writing group I speak of looked at my admittedly not-good-yet hit man yarn and then fell into bitter rage, as though I’d murdered their children before their eyes and then ate them in bite-sized uncooked pieces with an olive fork like Oscar Wilde, my pinkie waving arrogantly in the air.

Some of their critique may have been useful, but they yelled so loud, I couldn’t hear them . . . and I can’t hear you when you yell.

Look, Al Gore can scream at me about climate change. This here’s a fucking vampire novel fer chrissakes! Yeah, I’m striving to create the best darn one since Dracula, but trying to make me feel dumb as Dick Cheney’s gofer has never improved my work. Maybe the lazy and the deluded blossom under abuse, but my back pain and CRT-stung eyes put Yours Truly in a different class. Abuse only makes me want to quit and become a thought-starved bureaucrat again.

Another point: At best, I find writer’s groups are overrated; at worst they produce nothing but workshoppy writing that tastes like old gravy. Regarding the ones I’ve joined, I plead guilty to often trying to rewrite the other guy’s book. Most often, I got insecure and nervously wrote to avoid punishment. (“Put more of that literary stuff in. They love it! Cut that literary bullshit out. They hate it! I know! I’ll write the phone book! Nobody’ll get mad then!”) Then I’d stop writing period.

One more thing: I also found myself in trouble for liking—or not liking—another writer’s work. One group hinted that I wasn’t contributing enough to the discussion. When I started speaking up more, they hinted I should leave. Maybe I do lack guts and conviction. Maybe I was playing to the wrong crowd.

I’ve heard back from most of the readers by now. Comments are mostly positive, but, even better, some are pointed and incisive, while delivered in a thoughtful tone, as if I were a real grownup serious about making his humble piece something that readers will really enjoy. Most all agree that the early chapters are mostly a dreary info dump of too many characters, plot elements and story lines at once that eats up too many pages. One excellent point: I treated too many minor characters like major characters and that will trip up readers. An essential chapter was revealed as a major frustration that will take hours of frowning, pacing and rewriting to get right. One reader found entertaining a chapter I thought dull as C-Span. All of you said something helpful. I know you can't wait to read the acknowledgments.

Happily no one has screamed yet . . . exCEPT IN TERROR BWA-HA-HA . . . !

The comments continue to trickle in, but the three weeks are up. I’ve tossed the last gold coin into the treasure box of dreams and I’m back at it. I rework each chapter: hack, cut, carve, slice, trim, chop. A little razor work here, a roaring chainsaw there. I sit down with Patient Wife and read it out loud, search for errors and gauge her reaction. Then polish, trim cut. One reader recommended going through every page and cutting two sentences. Not as easy as it sounds, but it makes you look.

Before too long, I will type THE END. Then Dragon’s Ark will sail alone into the stormy seas of the marketplace. I'll shed a tear . . . and then start the next one.


Re-edited 6/8/11


Copyright 2008 by Thomas Burchfield