Living Life Again

It's been nearly five years since I've written on this blog.  Why?  Here's the story:

I found out I had cancer in early August of 2014.  Not coincidentally, my last blog post was less than a week before.  Being diagnosed with the "C" word can do a number to a person. From my perspective, I was in the fight of my life.  That meant that everything else in my life (anything frivolous, that is--not important things like family) got put on hold.  And it's a real shame, because I was on a roll!

Martin Sisters Publishing had picked up my first novel The Mentor the year before and I watched in amazement as it climbed up the amazon charts.  I found out that getting accepted wasn't the finish line.  It is just the first of many hurdles to cross.  That's where the real work began.  As the book inched it's way towards its publication date, promoting it took front and center.  This meant book signings, getting it into stores, and a speaking tour.

From early 2013 up until August of 2014, I kept myself busy not only promoting The Mentor, but capitalizing on its success by writing its sequel, The Captain, which promised to be even better.  In some ways it was.  People wanted to know what happens next to "Vincent Preston" and I was happy to take what little time I had to continue the story.  That's when I was knocked for a loop with the "C" word.

Now, all of my time was taken up with the fight of my life. The Captain, which was, as I said earlier, in ways better than The Mentor, never had a chance.  Instead of doing book signings, I wore a mask out in public to keep from getting sick.  Instead of going on another speaking tour, I sat listlessly in my easy chair as the chemo punched holes in my brain like Swiss cheese. (I still have a hard time remembering certain events in my life, though it is getting better.)  Instead of finishing the trilogy, which was the plan all along, I sat at a computer screen and deleted each page from book number three I turned out, which wasn't many.  It just wasn't any good.  Here I had spent a lifetime honing my craft, and I couldn't even put together a simple plot.  It was depressing.

Though I was able to get The Captain into Brace Books in Ponca City, that was it.  It languished on the shelves just as the title sat untouched on amazon.com.  All of that hard work for naught.  I felt like I had wasted such a good piece of literature by not being able to give it my full promotional attention.  And here's the worst of it.  As for future books, I didn't know what was going to happen.

Even if I could write another book, I didn't know when I would start feeling like myself again and have the energy to promote it.  Anything I put out was going to flop.  On top of that, once I defeated the big "C" I didn't know if/when it would come back again.  It was a tough feeling of defeat that forced my hand.  I made the decision to stop writing books.

I didn't tell anybody.  I couldn't even tell my wife.  It was a purgatory and I felt helpless.

Every now-and-then, friends and fans who meant well would ask me when my next book was coming out.  Each time it made me want to cry.  It had taken me 15 years to break into the industry, and after a little bit of success, BAM!  It was all taken away.  I felt it was my ethical duty to abstain from publishing anything further.  I couldn't take having another failure like The Captain, and the hopelessness that came along with knowing I had something really good that wouldn't get read.  And that was only possible if my stinking brain could even marshal a competent thought to write in the first place!

So each time somebody asked, I smiled and played it off as best as I could.

They say it takes a couple of years after finishing chemo for the body to start feeling normal again.  That is true-ish...  I finished my chemo in the fall of '15 and took up oil painting as a substitute for my creative outlet.  Or maybe it was just my escape from not writing.  My excuse?  I told myself to accept the fact that I was no longer a writer.  Despite selling quite a few paintings, I couldn't call myself an artist, since I have such a great respect for true art and the masters, but lingering in the back of my mind for five years, nagging at me, pulling at my conscience was an irrefutable fact; I am still a writer.  No matter what I told myself about what I could or couldn't do anymore, writing was still in my blood.

In the summer of 2018, my inhibitions began to change.  Outside of The Mentor and The Captain, I had four other books that I had written over the years with the intent of publishing when I had my first break.  One was the very first book I ever wrote, titled The Unwritten Rules of Moccasin Crick and a second one was my most recent book (outside of The Captain) titled Four Sycamores.  These two books had been stored on a flash drive which was collecting dust.

It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but one hot July day last year, I plugged in the flash drive and pulled up Four Sycamores.  I think my intention was to just read it to see if it was any good.  Then I remembered that I had received a rejection letter from a publisher years prior, and the editor actually took the time to point out a few of my writing flaws with this book.  Well, rereading the letter led to a few revisions here and there, you know, just to right a few wrongs, but the I got into it, and the more I read, the more I revised, and in a beautiful two weeks of being totally mesmerized by the story I had once created, my passion for writing leapfrogged my inhibitions.  After I was done, I immediately got to work on Moccasin Crick and turned this book full of juvenile creativity into something I was very proud of.  I put my flash drive away and wondered what had just happened.

Another school year came and went, and in June, while visiting a Barnes and Noble in Wichita, I found myself in the publishing section.  It just so happened that I came home with the 2019 copy of Writer's Market.  I spent the last month marking it up with a highlighter, just like in the old days before I was a published author.  I imagine it's a lot like a band that is a one-hit wonder, who breaks up over a petty complication, and who ends up back together in the old garage, cranking out new material, or at least new spins on old material.

So yesterday I sent off my first query letter to a literary agency.  Tonight I sent off my fifth.  As this blog entry stretches into the early-morning hours of tomorrow, I can see that the purgatory into which I imprisoned myself is gone.  I can feel the excitement coursing through me that will keep my eyes open when I finally do go to bed.  I don't have a crystal ball.  I don't know if an agent will want to pick me up and help me write the next chapter in my writing career.  I don't know if a publisher will find either of these two books enticing, but no matter what, I am writing again, and it feels great!