Resurrecting Manuscripts

By Chester Campbell

A lot of multi-published authors got their start with several years of rejections. After additional years of successfuly-published novels, some resurrected their early inventory and re-submitted them for publication. That's how my Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy came into being. After five Greg McKenzie mysteries and two Sid Chance PI novels, I turned to the first three manuscripts I wrote after taking up fiction on retiring in 1989.

I had written the first book using a simple word processor that required creating a different file for each chapter. After losing the agent who was pitching the book, I moved on to the next one and left the first manuscript on my office floor. Fortunately, somewhere along the line I consolidated the computer version into a single Word file.

In  2012 I loaded the file for Beware the Jabberwock and began revising it based on the accumulated knowledge about fiction writing I had acquired over the intervening years. Some of it involved eliminating overly descriptive passages. I also refined information that I had been a bit unsure about originally. And with my editor's help, I added some scenes that helped sharpen the tension.

After publication of the first book, I tackled the second in the trilogy, The Poksu Conspiracy. I discovered the original computer file had been lost, though I still had a printout of the manuscript. I bundled up the paper copy and shipped it off to a service that returned it in a digital file. Then I repeated the process I had gone through with Jabberwock. I had started this one with a long prologue, which gave a lot of background on one of the main characters in addition to information on how the Korean peninsula evolved into the situation that existed at the time of the story (fall of 1993.) I scrapped the prologue, working some of it into later chapters, and began with Burke Hill, the protagonist, in 1993.

I then turned to book three, which, after several changes, had become Overture to Disaster. This was the most ambitious project, involving parallel plots that started in the Ukraine (sound familiar?) and Washington, DC. It involves several issues that sound like it came from today's news, including nerve gas shells fired at crowds of civilians and hardliners hoping to re-establish the Soviet Union.

Overture has been published only as an ebook for the Kindle. I haven't really promoted it and there are no reviews on Amazon. So I decided it was time to do something about the situation. Tomorrow (Saturday, March 8) through Monday, Overture to Disaster will be free on Amazon during a BookBub promoton that will bring it to the attention of thousands of readers. We'll see what happens. If you would like a copy, click on this link and download yours. If you do, I'd appreciate a brief review on Amazon.

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Time to Write (Rewrite, Revise)

By Chester Campbell

Now that we're still perched up here on the fiscal cliff, at least for the next couple of months, I suppose we should get back to writing. Actually, for the past six months or so I've been involved in rewriting, or revising, as I prefer to call it. When I started my fiction writing career back in 1989 (my non-fiction career started in 1947), I turned out eight novels before getting into print. After having seven series books published, I decided to dig back into that pile of old manuscripts that had graced my office floor lo these many years.

Having been a fan for many years of the Cold War spy story, I was well versed in the three-digit organizations like the OSS, CIA, KGB, and MI6. I had written a spy story back in the sixties that spent six months with an editor at Avon before he gave up trying to sell his contemporaries. So when I turned to novel-writing after retirement, I scouted around for a good spy plot. With peristroica and glasnost in full sway, the Soviet Union was falling apart. I visualized what might happen in the aftermath. The demise of the Cold War would give Congress a great reason to slash military and intelligence spending. I came up with a plot involving rogue elements of both the KGB and CIA intent on keeping things in their favor.

For a protagonist, I had just the man, a former FBI agent I had known back in the late sixties when I served as editor of Nashville Magazine. He had an intriguing tale to tell of how he was left out in the cold by J. Edgar Hoover after failing to infiltrate the Mafia, an operation dreamed up by Hoover and his assistant director, Bill Sullivan. I did a wealth of research and turned out a story several editors liked but didn't buy.

Following the lead of authors like Joe Konrath and Rob Walker, I decided to revise the book, Beware the Jabberwock, and put it up for the Kindle. After lengthy revision, including the elimination of several thousand words, I had it edited and then published as an ebook. Since it is double the length of my series mysteries, I raised the price to $3.99 compared to $2.99 for the others.

Jabberwock was the first book of a thriller trilogy, so I tackled the second book next. I thought I had copies of the original manuscript computer files but couldn't find The Poksu Conspiracy anywhere. Fortunately I had a clean copy of the paper manuscript, which ran around 600 pages. I had recently read where MWA members could get a deal on transferring paper to digital by Blueleaf Book Scanning. I packed up all that paper, shipped it off, and soon had a PDF file ready for editing

With Poksu added to my Kindle inventory, I got to work on Overture to Disaster. This one had an interesting background. It started out the longest of the trilogy. I sent it to the Jay Garon-Brooke Agency and got a five-year contract after cutting a few hundred words. This was the agency that put John Grisham on the map, and it was in the zenith of his popularity, before he sued the agency after Garon's death. Unfortunately, they failed to get me a movie deal...or a publisher.

I have finally finished revising the manuscript and am ready for the final edit. It should be turned into an ebook in the next couple of months. All of which means it's time for me to get back to writing something original, like the sixth Greg McKenzie mystery.

Of course I still have a couple of more old manuscripts lying around that need to be revised and put out as ebooks. Seems like there's no end to this.

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The Genesis of a Character

A couple of my colleagues here have been talking about characters. They are the building blocks of a story. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes may make for excitement, but it's how people react to such phenomena that we enjoy reading about. I know some authors who tear pictures of people out of magazines and post them near the computer to model for their characters. Others base characteristics of their creations on people they know.

For the most part, I create my characters from scratch, giving them traits and history that blends in with their role in the story. I literally build them as I go, adding to the characters as the story develops (I don't outline or plot the book in advance). When I began writing what became my first published mystery, Secret of the Scroll, book one of five in the Greg McKenzie series, the tale I had in mind required a retiree with investigative experience. Since I had an Air Force background, I decided to make him a former Office of Special Investigations agent. And since I had gotten involved in the new Scottish Society of Middle Tennessee, I gave him a Scottish name and heritage.

As I said, that has been the case with most of the characters who people my books. However, there has been one striking departure. It involved the first novel I wrote when I turned to fiction in earnest back in 1989. That time, also, I needed a man with investigative experience. But in this case he would need a background that would allow him to have worked in the past with a CIA officer. As I thought about it, I had the perfect fit in a former FBI agent I had first met during my days as editor of Nashville Magazine.

I discussed the man whose background formed the basis for my character Burke Hill on this blog last April in The Story Behind the Story. I didn't use his physical characteristics for Hill, and I did a bit of tweaking with his backstory, shifting the timeline and fictionalizing his activities following the dismissal by J. Edgar Hoover. A tale about Burke working with his old CIA buddy in Mexico isn't part of the story related by my ex-FBI friend, but he did tell me about a wild concoction produced by a lab at Dugway Proving Grounds.

Hill is the central figure in my trilogy of Post Cold War political thrillers, which had different literary agents when written in the early nineties and wound up in the manuscript pile on my office floor. The first, Beware the Jabberwock, was finally published this year and is available on Amazon in ebook and paperback. The second, The Poksu Conspiracy, will be in the Kindle Store by the end of this month.

Burke Hill's character is further fictionalized in the second book with the revelation of a son by his first marriage. But the basic story of his FBI career, starting with his job of delivering documents to Hoover's home, follows the account the agent told me in interviews.

The other characters in both books are figments of my imagination. Incidentally, I haven't mentioned the former agent's name, but if you're curious, take a look at the dedication in the print version.

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Do Thrillers Need People Continuously Hanging from Cliffs?

By Chester Campbell

My newest published book takes me back to my writerly roots, meaning espionage fiction, or put more simply, spy stories. That's what I started writing (and not getting published) back in the sixties. After a twenty-something-year hiatus, I returned to the genre when I retired in 1989. I wrote a trilogy of Post Cold War thrillers about an ex-FBI agent who gets caught up in the espionage business. Now revised for publication after another twenty-something years, Beware the Jabberwock has been out as an ebook for a few months and will be up on Amazon as a paperback in a few days.

I have received a few five-star reviews, but I'm wondering how other folks feel about the thriller variety. Do you think it's necessary to have the hero in a constant cliff-hanger status, or is it just as good to keep the tension up but spend some time developing the characters so  you understand why they do what they do? Bad guys as well as good?

Frankly, my thrillers don't move at breakneck speed, dashing all over Paris and France and who knows where else in a 24-hour period. The main part of Jabberwock takes place over a three-week period, but there's always that dealine staring you in the face.

So what do you think? What's a thriller writer to do?

Read more about Beware the Jabberwock at my website.