Writing at a Snail's Pace

By Chester Campbell

I’m in the process of working on my fifth Greg McKenzie mystery. So far it has been moving like a snail racing across the street. Matter of fact, I wrote something about creating the plot on my personal blog (Mystery Mania) back toward the end of February, and I'm now only a third of the way through the writing. I suppose the problem is still as I characterized it earlier: "the old gray matter, she ain't what she used to be."

When I began working on the plot, the first idea out of the box did not deal with character or setting or plot action. Well, setting, in one of its narrow aspects. We're talking about time. The series has been moving at a leisurely pace through the calendar. Designed to Kill took place at the first of November, Deadly Illusions followed with the first blush of spring (does spring really blush?), and The Marathon Murders sweated out the steamy days of August. So, I reasoned, the next adventure should occur at Christmastime.

Wouldn’t you know, in Greg years, it’s still 2004. If I could do that, I wouldn’t be quite 80 yet. However, it presents a few problems in keeping the details straight. For example, the plot involves professional sports. In 2004, the arena where the Nashville Predators NHL team plays was called the Gaylord Entertainment Center or "The GEC" (pronounced Geck). Now it is the Sommet Center. So in the book it's only referred to as the "arena."

Anyway, back to the plot. As a seat-of-the-pants plotter, I had a basic idea, but I needed a cast of characters to do the work. I didn't want to get stuck with doing all that work myself. I had my main characters, Greg and Jill McKenzie, my indefatigable pair of senior sleuths, but a bunch of people was required for them to bounce off of.

I quickly came up with job descriptions for four possible bad guys or gals. And just as quickly I spotted the one who really “did it.” I picked an age and began to delve into the person's background. What would make this an interesting character? How did the killer become what they were today?

Okay, this is a mystery, and I’m not giving you any clues. I did a lot of Googling and bounced around the Internet quite a bit to track down some facts. Hmmm, come to think of it, back when I first began searching for stuff online, Yahoo was the big thing. But you don’t hear of people Yahooing. They’ve been sort of left in the dust, I suppose.

The subject of the plot is not one in which I’m particularly well versed, so I also searched about for some basic information on the business. Since it involves a conflict between people involved in two different sports, basketball and hockey, I decided my best bet was to talk with a TV sportscaster. Both Greg and I interviewed Rudy Kalis, sports director at Nashville's Channel 4, WSMV.

So far, Christmas has been sort of incidental to the action, but who knows how it will play out. A Christmas party provided an opportunity for Greg to get some information he needed. I suspect there's more to come.

Sometimes I start a book before I’m ready with a full-blown plot by sitting at the computer and writing a first page. It may not be the same first page I end up with, but it gets the window open and the curtains blowing. That's what happened this time. And after five books, it's my first experience with a murder on page one.

So after eight months of dilly-dallying around, promoting the heck out of my latest book and finding places to sign and sell all five current titles, I'm faced with the necessity of locking myself up (would be nice, but won't happen) and knocking out another 50,000 words in the next couple of months.

Wish me luck. And let me know how you're doing on your latest masterpeice.

The Long Goodbye for Publishing

By Chester Campbell

Mystery fans are well aware that The Long Goodbye is a Philip Marlowe story written by the iconic Raymond Chandler. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1955. Interestingly, it appears in a quite different context in the headline for an article in The Nation by Elizabeth Sifton, a senior vp at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

The article appears under the heading The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes.

There has been a lot said and written lately about the state of publishing, or should I say the sad state of publishing. Ms. Sifton’s article covers the history of the business and the practices that led up to the current scene as well as anything I’ve seen. She has spent nearly half a century in the field, working for several different book publishers as they merged into conglomerates. Re the latter, she had this to say:

“As the megapublishers tightened their grip in the 1980s, I was dismayed to see a number of once good firms of markedly different publishing style or literary taste make foolish, overpriced mistakes; they seemed to be losing their bearings as they paid ever more money for ever more questionable properties, entrusting the sewing up of these sow's ears to not very experienced practitioners.”

She quoted this from one publisher: "Businessmen never learn from their mistakes because they always find someone else to blame for them," he said. "Businessmen only learn from their successes. Except publishers can't do that."

Ms. Sifton says the arithmetic on how publishers calculate their income and outgo has remained unchanged since the middle of the last century. “Of the roughly $10 a publisher took in on a $20 book, say, 10 to 15 percent of the cover price was allocated to the author, leaving only the remaining $7.50 or so to cover the fixed, make-ready costs (coding, proofing and correcting the author's original disk, press preparation and such); the varying paper, printing and binding costs; the cost of sales and marketing; the overhead; and maybe some profit, 4 to 5 percent if all went well. No wonder they longed for bestsellers, the income from which would allow expansion of staff, or staff salaries, or the size of the list--or profits.”

Regarding authors’ royalties, she observes, “Their ever more powerful agents have successfully decoupled the size of the royalty advances they receive from any estimate of the books' eventual earnings, and routinely assure them that if Knopf or Norton or Morrow fails to earn back the upfront money, it's because their masterpieces were badly published, not because the advances were implausibly high.”

After discussing Amazon and Google and the current state of affairs, she bemoans, “I, for one, don't trust the book trade to see us through this. Wariness is in order.”

I highly recommend the article, which you can read HERE.

Once Upon a Time...

By Chester Campbell


That's the way stories are supposed to begin, isn't it? I think I remember. I used to be a mystery writer once upon a time. I created colorful characters and exciting scenes where breathtaking actions occurred. I dreamed up plots that could get the old ticker pounding away. It was a lot of fun.

With my first published book, I sat down to write after spending two weeks roaming the Holy Land with a group of wide-eyed tourists. At times it was hot and sweaty, but never dull. Gazing out across the Dead Sea from the Herod's mountain fortress at Masada was awesome. Back home I relived those moments through the eyes of my characters as they took the same routes.

The second book involved a balcony collapse at a high-rise condo on the beach at Perdido Key, Florida. I wrote part of it while sitting with my laptop in my brother's condo on the beach at Perdido Key. That's the kind of roughing it a writer should be forced to do. The research also involved a side trip to a casino in Biloxi, Mississippi. What I call going all out for your craft.

For the third book, I took on a stay-at-home assignment. The story was set around Nashville, though I did a lot of nosing in areas I hadn't visited in years. I also did a ride-along with a Metro Nashville homicide detective. I learned such interesting things as their fascination with racing through the streets whether in an emergency or not, and doing U-turns just because they could. I delved a bit into Scottish heritage to fill out Greg McKenzie's family background in the military. That was fun.

Book four was particularly fascinating because it involved a restored 1914 auto factory. I nosed around the area where I lived for a year after serving in the Korean War. And for this one I also brought in the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. That required a revealing tour of the TBI facility, where I made some good contacts. I also visited a small town not too far away several times, checking locations where I busily committed several murders. A writer's work is never done.

The fifth book brought a new character and new challenges. He's a single guy with an entirely different background. Plus I wanted to switch from first person to third, putting a different perspective on the writing. On this project, I mostly indulged my habit of working on my laptop in the living room instead of on the PC up in the office. It got me away from the distraction of email, though with wireless internet I still had Google at my fingertips.

As I said at the beginning, I used to be a mystery writer. However, lately I have become a blogger and a Twitterer, a newsletter writer and a website designer. My mailbox fills with hundreds of emails daily from 19 different Yahoo groups and countless others from who-knows-where. I Google my name and book titles to see who's writing about them, and I check my Amazon rankings for clues on whether I'm selling.

I guess I've become a promoter and a marketer. I don't expect to get rich. Heck, I'd be happy to break even for a change. But I crave the feeling that people are reading and enjoying what I write. That means I've got to sell. And nobody's going to do it but me.

I've about reached the point, though, where I'm ready to chuck it all, grab my laptop, head back down to the living room, and become a writer again. Wouldn't that be fun! (But first I've got to get this post up on the blogsite.)