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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Putting Yourself in Your Book

By Chester Campbell

I'm not talking about making yourself a character in your book, but consciously or not we usually include a lot of ourselves in our writing. Back in the days when I made a lot of public appearances (a voice problem limits my talking these days), I would talk about my Greg McKenzie mysteries and someone would invariably ask, "Is Greg really you?"

My standard reply was, "He's bigger and bolder and more confrontational than me, but we think a lot alike."

A lot of my characters have no relationship to me, either in size or demeanor or thought processes. But at least one of the key personalities is bound to express my sentiments about the situation. It just comes flowing out of my fingers naturally. I choose to write about subjects that interest me, which means I have feelings that get expressed in one way or another.

There are other ways we put ourselves in our novels. One is to use experiences we've had some place or another. I've done that countless times. In my first post Cold War political thriller, Beware the Jabberwock, I had my two principal characters, Burke Hill and Lori Quinn, ride the Star Ferry across Hong Kong Harbor. I described it as I remembered from my visit to Hong Kong back in 1987 (the story takes place in 1992).

In the second of the thriller trilogy, The Poksu Conspiracy, I had Burke Hill visit Chiangmai, Thailand. I used the Top North Guest House where my wife and I and our son and his wife stayed during our Far East tour. It was more like an early American motel with limited amenities. I also used places we visited such as the Chiangmai Night Bazaar and Wat Prathat Doi Suthep, a Buddhist temple high on a mountain west of the city.

My first Greg McKenzie mystery was based largely on a tour I took of the Holy Land in 1998. Greg and Jill make a similar journey as the book begins, and several of the characters were based on people I met during the trip. One who played a key role was our tour guide in Israel, an American who had lived in Jerusalem for several years. I used a lot of her characteristics but changed her sex for plot reasons.

I think most writers put a lot of themselves in their books in one way or another. Do you find your thoughts, your preferences, your characteristics, your experiences showing up in your prose?

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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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