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.

Visit me at Mystery Mania

The Story Behind the Story

My newest ebook, just available on Amazon for the Kindle, is titled Beware the Jabberwock. It has quite a story behind it. Actually, several stories. I wrote it back in 1990 after I retired from an eighteen-year career as executive vice president of a statewide trade association. I had written non-fiction for years as a newspaper reporter, free-lance writer, magazine editor, and a few other permutations. I had written two book manuscripts over the years and told everyone I intended to write novels when I retired.

I was an avid spy story reader all through the Cold War, so it was natural that I turned to this genre when I looked for a plot. I had read extensively about the KGB and CIA and had no trouble creating a situation involving both agencies. With the Iron Curtain shredding and the Soviet Union falling apart, clandestine warriors on both sides found their futures in jeopardy. I chose that as my starting point.

Since this was an international thriller, the setting was anywhere. I had been on a fifteen-day tour of Europe in the early eighties and spent a month touring the Far East in 1987. With that background, I had lots of possibilities to choose from. I started the story in Vienna, then moved to Washington, DC.guide I had to depend on guidebooks for scenes on Cyprus and in Tel Aviv, but I had visited Hong Kong and most of the locations in the States. I created a small island off the Florida coast south of Apalachicola.

For the main character, I turned to a man I had met back in the sixties when I was editor of Nashville Magazine. He was a close friend of one of my colleagues and I got to know him pretty well. He was an ex-FBI agent with a wild story to tell. I did a long interview with him, and we talked about writing a book. Then he had second thoughts about writing it as a true story. The statute of limitations hadn't run out on some of the things he had done.

According to his story, and my colleague vouched for his authenticity, he had gone to Washington out of high school and worked as a clerk at FBI Headquarters while getting an accounting degree. His job involved taking documents to Hoover's home, and he became closely associated with the director. He attended the FBI Academy after graduation and worked as a field agent. He was tapped by Hoover to be a member of his Goon Squad, a select group of agents who carried out sometimes illegal acts for the director. According to my guy, some of it involved cases outside the U.S.

Hoover and his assistant came up with a plan to infiltrate the Mafia and chose my agent for the task. He was told to resign from the FBI, commit a few crimes to establish his bona fides, and work to get in with the mob in Las Vegas. But after months of trying, he never managed to get connected. When he came back to Washington, Hoover refused to talk to him, calling him a failure.

All of this is covered in the background of my character, Burke Hill. I lost contact with the ex-agent but learned he died several years ago. It makes for quite a story. You can check out Beware the Jabberwock at  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007VQJ3PY.

Chester Campbell

Visit me at Mystery Mania

How Writers Change

I've been going through an interesting exercise. When I first started writing mystery novels around mid-1989, my reading experience for the past several years had been mostly confined to Cold War spy stories. I devoured all the John le Carre, Graham Greene, Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum, and Tom Clancy books, among others. So it was only natural to put my fiction writing efforts into that genre. Except at that time, it became post-Cold War espionage.

I started with a trilogy featuring a disgraced former FBI agent modeled after a man I had met through a friend. I had a different agent for each book, which is another story I covered in my Mystery Mania blog. A couple of the manuscripts got good marks from editors, though they didn't happen to be what the editors were looking for. So no sales. Along with the other four books I wrote before my first manuscript sale, I piled them up in a corner of my office. And in a corner of my hard drive.

After reading what people like Joe Konrath and Rob Walker had been doing, I decided it would be a good thing to revise the trilogy and turn them into ebooks for the Kindle and Smashwords. When I finished work on my new Sid Chance thriller, The Good, The Bad and The Murderous, I put the first book, Beware the Jabberwock, in my laptop and began reading. The first thing I noticed was it ran better than 125,000 words. My published PI novels average around 70,000-words. The next things I noticed were lots of adverbs and many dialog attributions besides the ubiquitous "said."

Another interesting development was a lack of hesitation in shifting points of view. It wasn't done willy-nilly, but when I wanted to reflect a character's thoughts or feelings, I did. There was never any doubt as to whose head I was in.

In each scene, I described the surroundings in detail. Not so much in this book but in the third of the series I ran into problems the agent referred to as "overwritiing." It ran over 600 pages. My editor on the first published book straightened me out on some of this. Besides generally being too wordy, I was saying the same thing in different ways. And I was guilty of over-explaining what was going on. The editor said, "Don't play down to your readers. They're smarter than you think."

Re-working the story after twenty years, I was impressed with the research I had done. I found a lot of good information I had forgotten about. As I moved along, I cut down on the adverbosity (sounds like it should be a word), changed most of the attributions to "said" or "asked," and used breaks before changing points of view.I didn't shorten the manuscript by much, but since it's a thriller, that shouldn't be a problem.

The one negative comment from any of the editors who read the original Jabberwock manuscript was that it "did not seem quite as fast-paced and compelling as a thriller of this type should be." I'll admit it doesn't run at breakneck speed, but it's a story that develops over an eight-month period. It has tense moments and lighter moments and picks up speed as it goes along. My usual first readers will have a go at it, then I'll put it out there for the ebook audience and see what happens. Meanwhile, I have two more to revise. Have you tried anything like this?

Chester D. Campbell