With the release of my latest book, Novel Concept, I had the urge to explain myself, I mean, examine the creative process and how this story came to be (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4).
 | Amazon announced their Kindle and set in motion the self-publishing revolution. I saw a couple of acquaintances go out self-publish their stories, the stories they really wanted to tell. Frankly, there wasn’t much going on for me, so I stuck a toe in the water. That toe was “Lost Claus” (which I go into here). I now realized I could get those stories I wanted out to the public, or some of them anyway. |
After that, I wrote a follow-up (Space Case), then a Halloween story I always wanted to tell. And I had enough fun doing it that it gave me the moxie to pull “The Write Stuff” out of storage. Now I had the reason, the attainable goal, to get me to finish and fix this story. There was updating to do. Reams of pages to rewrite. I had to re-read it all several times finding the clues to what was in those missing chapters. I had references and call-backs to jokes from those mystery pages so I had a solid frame work. And a lot of good memories of the book. There were fun details I could easily recall that existed from those pages. Jokes and wordplay I knew I could restore. I had to make sure, especially, that I could re-discover the voice of the book. I’m assuming my writing style has changed over the years, getting leaner, more subtle. Could I get back to this earlier, goofy, lively voice? I think I did.
Plus the title had to go. The title “The Write Stuff,” felt dated and seemed to be over-used out there. I needed to rename my work. That’s where the passage of time came into play. After my adventures in Hollywood, a seed was planted. I thought to myself “This would be a funny story, it could be like a sequel to ‘The Write Stuff’ where my writer character gets his story optioned and gets to write the screenplay.” That’s me, thinking up a sequel to a story I hadn’t put out there yet. But then the title for the sequel hit me, “High Concept,” a Hollywood term for a type of blockbuster movie. For some reason I decided that if that’s the title to the second book, the first book should have a similar title. Working backwards the novel became “Novel Concept.”
All I had to do was format it all for the Kindle specs and the paperback and get an ace cover design. It was a long journey for this story. I wound up updating some things and not others, acknowledging the present I was in at the time of publishing, but keeping a timeless feel from all the years it laid in wait. And it was fun to get into the head of my younger, glibber, less-structured self. So, it’s been released onto the world and it’s a relief to free this long-stifled comedy.
Plus the title had to go. The title “The Write Stuff,” felt dated and seemed to be over-used out there. I needed to rename my work. That’s where the passage of time came into play. After my adventures in Hollywood, a seed was planted. I thought to myself “This would be a funny story, it could be like a sequel to ‘The Write Stuff’ where my writer character gets his story optioned and gets to write the screenplay.” That’s me, thinking up a sequel to a story I hadn’t put out there yet. But then the title for the sequel hit me, “High Concept,” a Hollywood term for a type of blockbuster movie. For some reason I decided that if that’s the title to the second book, the first book should have a similar title. Working backwards the novel became “Novel Concept.”
All I had to do was format it all for the Kindle specs and the paperback and get an ace cover design. It was a long journey for this story. I wound up updating some things and not others, acknowledging the present I was in at the time of publishing, but keeping a timeless feel from all the years it laid in wait. And it was fun to get into the head of my younger, glibber, less-structured self. So, it’s been released onto the world and it’s a relief to free this long-stifled comedy.
