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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Best Supporting Character Interview

You usually hear the best supporting character term in relation to movie actors, but in this case it involves a novel character. This woman plays the major role outside the protagonist in Beware the Jabberwock, a Post Cold War thriller available in the Kindle Store. Her name is Lorelei Quinn. Let's get to the interview.

MMM: Welcome to our blog, Miss Quinn.

LQ: My pleasure.

MMM: I understand you're in the travel business. Tell us a little about your background.

LQ: My dad worked in various embassy assignments, so I grew up well-traveled. I loved writing, though, and when it came time for college, I studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin. After graduation, I got a job a job as a reporter for the English language Herald Tribune in Paris.

MMM: That must have been a real plum.

LQ: I'll admit I got some help from an old friend of my dad's.

MMM: I hear by the grapevine that you made a little detour to Camp Peary in northern Virginia before journeying to Paris.

LQ: Somebody has been talking too much. But I've made no big secret that I once worked for the CIA. It's actually how I got into the travel business. I left the newspaper to work as a travel agent, taking tours around Europe, both East and West. It provided a handy cover for operating behind the Iron Curtain.

MMM: You followed in the footsteps of your father, Cameron Quinn, didn't you?

LQ: Dad began his clandestine career with General William Donovan in the OSS during World War II.

MMM: Doesn't your Clipper Cruise and Travel have a relationship with the CIA?

LQ: If I denied it, you would probably say I'm lying.

MMM: But you deny it?

LQ: Yes.

WWW: Your main office in Rosslyn has some beautiful paintings of old clipper ships. What's the significance?

LQ: I have loved sailing for years. I go out frequently with some friends.

WWW: I understand you were involved in a pretty scary sailing expedition related to Operation Jabberwock.

LQ: Somebody's been talking too much. But it's true. We were caught in a bad storm at night south of the Florida Gulf coast.

WWW: Didn't  you have some other pretty frightening experiences during that time?

LQ: I'm sorry, but I'm not allowed to comment any further about that operation. Your readers will just have to refer to the Jabberwock report.

WWW: Thank you, Miss Quinn. Good luck with your future ventures. If you'd like to find out more about the exciting adventures of Lori Quinn and her friend, Burke Hill, you can access the "report" at this link.

Chester Campbell 

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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