Confessions of an Accidental Writer

Today, I bit the bullet and Googled myself. Or rather, I Googled my book, figuring it was about time I uncovered any negative reviews and took the authors off my Christmas card list. 

Trouble is, even with the most specific search terms imaginable (”antony john busted confessions flux”) I was flooded with links to all sorts of news items I’d rather not think about. As of today, Google connects my precious little novel with:

* John Edwards busted for adultery

* Carmelo Anthony busted for marijuana possession

* CNN reporter Richard Quest busted for drugs

Sensing a theme here? I sure am, and so I’ve decided to learn from my mistakes. In future, my book titles will only comprise various combinations of the following words: cute, cuddly, happy, fairy, kindness, patience, sharing, twinkly, baubles.

Oh yeah, baby. You may as well start engraving my name on the Pulitzer Prize right now.

From sketchy half-baked idea to shiny, hardback novel:

Agent extraordinaire Ted began pitching Busted to publishers in June 2007, and shortly after, Andrew Karre at Flux called me to chat about the book. I was completely wowed by his vision, as well as his remarks on how it could be improved. (And yeah, he was dead right, by the way.)

Once I’d signed on with Flux, we began the process of editing (again) and reediting. And sometimes, just for fun, we’d edit some more. In fact, from September to December 2007 the word count ballooned from 47000 to 56000 through the addition of some much-needed back story and clarifying scenes. Andrew was a delight to work with the whole time—full of great ideas, and supportive of any way I chose to interpret them. If it weren’t for the constraints of those pesky deadlines and release date, I’d still be revising the book with him today, and loving every minute of it too, to be honest.

Between January and March 2008, things were quiet at my end, while Gavin Duffy at Flux conceived the cover art, and began producing an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy, to be used for publicity purposes). In April, Sandy Sullivan (another editor) took over, sending me comments on matters of consistency, timelines, etc. These I completed by mid May, just as the ARC was coming out. Of course, the ARC revealed some more issues that needed resolving, hence another round of edits which were completed, um . . . kind of at the last minute.

But as of this moment, Busted is at the printers, and I am eagerly awaiting the October 1 release date. And to be honest, I couldn’t be happier with how everything has worked out, from start to almost-finish.

Still, there’s a long way to go before October 1, and that’s where this blog comes in . . . I’ll use it to keep you posted on promotional matters, appearances, and the countdown to publication. Toddler-nap permitting, it’ll be the place where I fill you in on everything that goes down in the weeks leading up to the release date.

Something tells me it could be a fairly chaotic ride!

How to suck really, really badly, and live to tell the tale:

My novel, Busted, was written in the spring of 2006. My wife had given birth to our first child a few months before, and as a new stay-at-home dad, I was looking for a creative outlet to take the place of music composition (which required too much collaboration for my new lifestyle). Writing each evening from ten to midnight, I planned the novel pretty thoroughly for one month and wrote it in under two. Then I showed it to some friends I knew were prepared to be critical (thanks Audrey, Robyn, Simon, and Nick) and waited for the onslaught. To my surprise and delight, their criticism (which was, frankly, voluminous) was tempered with genuine enthusiasm, and I began to believe that Busted might one day find a home on the shelves of your friendly neighborhood bookstore.

All the same, I knew better than to get too excited. See, I’d experienced this particular misapprehension / delusion the previous year, when I’d written a book (let’s call it Dogpile) that was utterly unpublishable for reasons too numerous to list here. The highly reputable agents I queried about the Dogpile needed only three chapters to assure me that they weren’t right for the project, which was really generous of them considering the book was terrible and there isn’t an agent in the world who is right for it. But it wasn’t a complete waste of time. I pretty quickly realized what was wrong with the Dogpile, and vowed not to make the same mistakes again. I also committed to reading more YA novels, to understand the genre better, and now read one or two a week. And most of all, I discovered that even though my book stunk, I wrote a query letter enticing enough to coerce poor, unwitting agents into reading my work.

And as you’ll see in Part 2, that turned out to be a pretty useful skill.