When It Rains, It Rains Frogs. Mutant Frogs.

So a few weeks ago, I confessed that I hadn’t been writing. Not for months. But now I’m back like a butterfly tramp stamp. And I’ve got a lot to write. Too much, actually.

It's not like the merciful end to a writer’s block, when the debris sort of sloughs away and the words and ideas start trickling, slowly at first, before picking up speed. Because this was unnatural. My brain had been active, but I had been willfully pushing all ideas back down into my psyche, waiting for certain external things to resolve, publisher-wise. But now that I’m writing again, I find myself somewhat paralyzed by the sheer number of things crying out to be written.

I might liken it to my favorite method of brewing coffee; the Toddy Cold Brew System. This method involves leaving nine cups of water and one pound of coarse-ground coffee in a carafe to brew at room temperature for twelve hours—or longer if you want it stronger. At the bottom is a special filter and a litter rubber stopper to keep the coffee in there, steeping for the designated period. (The result is a delicious, non-bitter coffee concentrate that can be used to make hot or cold coffee or specialty coffee drinks.)

So it’s like I put the stopper in when I stopped writing and this stuff has been percolating for months. And now that I’ve pulled out the stopper, it . . . You know what? Let me switch metaphors.

You know how they say, “When it rains, it pours?” Well, in my case, it's not normal pouring. It’s more like the frogs that rained down on Egypt. As soon as they land, they start jumping around, croaking and looking for attention. These ideas are alive and somewhat angry. Instead of ribbit, they say, “Write-Me.” And they’re not even regular frogs. They’re mutating before my eyes as they jump around!

What I mean by that is, I spent the last week as camp pastor at a Christian camp for 7th and 8th graders. As I was reflecting on some of the peculiarities of Christian camp culture, it occurred to me that it would make a great setting for a Young Adult suspense story. I’ve never written YA, but I actually still read it—both with my son and (certain books by J.D. Fitzgerald, Gordon Korman, and Frank Peretti) for my own amusement. On top of that, I do believe I have a gift for communicating with young people. Without my consent, one of my frogs (a book I’ve outlined and started) mutated before my eyes into a better idea for a YA novel. I sent my agent an e-mail about it and she agreed it’s a good idea. But they all seem like good ideas at the moment.

So the question remains, what to write? I’ve got the Playing Saint sequel, about which I’m jazzed, but which I’ve given up the idea of selling to a major publisher. There’s this semi out-there project, which is trying to morph into a YA novel. And, of course, the reboot of my gritty, urban retelling of the story of Elijah. Not to mention a sort of medical suspense thing I’ve been outlining in really broad terms, working title: Expiration. And two different nonfiction works.

Usually, one of those frogs is croaking far louder than the others; so you write the thing you can’t bear to not write for one more minute. But this time, they’re all hopped up (heh) on Red Bull, ribbiting at full-blast. I’ve been tending to each one in turn, a bit here and bit there. But I really want to attack one project full-force, and soon. Maybe the right answer will suddenly appear in a Writer’s Digest article about the current state of the market or in an e-mail from a reader. Or maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow with a singular desire to write one of these things and see it through to the end.

Either way, after months of writing nothing at all, it’s a good problem to have.


Update (9/12/16): It's the YA novel. I've used a push broom to corral all the other frogs into a large terrarium and I'm going full-speed on this one.
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#amNOTwriting: A Confession

So you should never begin a blog post by apologizing for “how long it’s been” since you last blogged or (worse) explaining why it’s been so very long. Writing (and Speaking) 101: always start strong, with a hook, not with a soul-suckingly boring laundry list of tedious events and obligations. But what if you’re writing about the dearth of posts? Is it okay then? Nah, still better to kick it off with something that grabs the reader, like . . .

Confession: I haven’t been writing.

If I were the kind of guy to use established hashtags on a regular basis, you’d still never see the ironically-broken-English-sounding #amwriting tag from me—at least not since last November, when I finished a short story double-header called God Rest Ye Motor City, which I think is some of my best writing to date, despite having been cranked out in just a few days. “#AmNOTwriting” is more like it (or maybe . . . “#aintwriting” to better mirror the janky grammatical issues of the original?). Yeah, every tweet and post since before Thanksgiving should be tagged with one of those. I’ve spoken at three writing conferences during that time, but I haven’t been writing anything.

I guess that’s not entirely true. I write a sermon every week. Often two. And sometimes a lesson. But that’s a whole different thing.

So what makes a just-starting-out novelist, briefly referred to as “The Suspense Author Everyone’s Talking About,” just . . . stop? I’d like to say it's kind of a Salinger thing. I’ve penned my Catcher and my Nine Stories and now I’m fading into obscurity while the world builds up my mythos. But that doesn’t work when your paperbacks are ranked in the neighborhood of 1,000,000 on Amazon and everyone’s not, in actuality, “talking about”  you. So, at the risk of reciting the aforementioned soul-suckingly boring laundry list of events, let me fill you in . . .

My two traditionally published books, Playing Saint (2014) and The Last Con (2015), have performed as one would expect the debut and follow-up of an unknown author to perform—neither breakout smash hits nor total flops. They were nominated for three awards, were finalists in all three, but won none. And, for a variety of reasons, my publisher and I parted ways. Which makes it sound like it was mutual, when in reality they had a contractual right of first refusal and they exercised that right (specifically on a proposal for a Playing Saint sequel).

So my agent sent the prop on to some other publishers, along with a proposal for a book I’m currently calling Clinch, which has a rather out-there premise, involving a paramedic, a long-lost treasure, an Indian tribe, and a woman who runs a junk shop by day and decides to become a super hero by night—all in a sleepy little Midwest tourist town. Not surprisingly, Breaking Saint (as I’ve been calling the Playing Saint, pt 2) was a none-starter. No one wants to do the sequel to a modestly-performing thriller owned by the competition. (In fact, a couple editors seemed kind of confused to have received the proposal.) And Clinch was just too unconventional, they said. Too fringe. Too niche. Too midlist. But we like the writing and please send us any future projects that are more marketable.

In early April, I decided to start another project while I waited to hear back from the remaining publishers considering these proposals. I would write a nonfiction book I’d been outlining for quite some time and serialize it, releasing a chapter at a time on The Blazing Center, an awesome online magazine that has published my work in the past. I was thinking I’d write one chapter every couple weeks. To date, I’ve written (waaaait for iiiit) one chapter. And, if I’m honest, that one was already written, almost a year earlier. Chapter 2 remains half-done. It’s been almost three months.

While #notwriitng, I’ve been barely-active on social media (at least on my author accounts), occasionally sharing the sort of stuff authors of Christian fiction are expected to share, along with a few things I actually wanted to. It’s been no secret that I’ve had something of an ongoing struggle with pandering, whether with my “image” as an author or with the actual content of my books. More on that in a future post. Suffice to say, in response to all this, I wrote most of a book proposal that I’m fairly sure would get picked up by an advance-paying publisher if I were to put it out there. And yet, I really had no interest in writing it. Or writing at all.

But wait! Come to think of it, I have been writing something over the past few months. Me and my buddy Ted Kluck have been writing a sequel to the end-times satire we put out in 2012. It’s the last thing any mainstream CBA publisher would touch. But I’m writing like an animal. Seriously, I can’t stop. Maybe because it’s refreshing to write without the pressure of trying to break out of the midlist, without dulling the sharp edges to suit the market, without subconsciously trying to target a demographic that is unlikely to get what I really want to say. Instead, I can write for the hundred or so people who actually e-mail and tweet me, asking when they can read my next book, because they loved the last one. I can write what I want to read. It’s stupid stuff at the moment (seriously, the plot involves a drug called “Ultragest” that shortens the human gestation period to six weeks), but it’s freeing in a weird way. It's the means, not the end, but it actually has me writing again.

So here’s the updated confession: My name is Zach and I’m a midlist author. (“Hiii, Zach.”) And I’m cool with it. I #amwriting, but I’m on no one’s 2016 list. It’s been nearly a year since The Last Con came out and I finally feel the desire to write again—not from without (you should have another book in the works or you'll be a year behind!), but from within.

And here’s what I see in my future: I’m not waiting for one of the Big Six (which I think have become the Big Four) to sign me again. I’m not waiting for anything.

• I’m going to finish Chapter 2 of Out of Sardis and send it to The Blazing Center.
• I’m going to finish Breaking Saint and it will be available to readers next year, even if I put it out independently. People keep asking if there will be another Parker Saint book. There will, God willing.
• And I am going to reboot my gritty, modern retelling of the story of the prophet Elijah, through a new upstart publisher where a bunch of blood and bullets are not a deal-breaker. I’m hoping to make it a trilogy.

And I’ll keep you in the loop, right in this space. Here’s a hashtag I’ll actually use: #MidlistMondays. Most Mondays for the foreseeable future, starting next Monday, I’ll explore a different aspect of life in the literary limbo where I currently reside,having decided to just get comfortable here, light up a fine cigar, and craft some books that I would want to read. Books like Playing Saint. Books like The Christian Gentleman’s Smoking Companion, which I wrote and published with Ted and which has sold almost as many copies as either of my traditionally published novels.

While I respect all the podcasts and workshops and books about how to get your foot in the door of the Publishing Machine (I even contributed to one) as well as all the advice, freely (and not-so-freely) given by industry veterans, about how to keep your career moving up and your “platform” expanding . . . when it actually quenches your desire to write, it’s time to let all that go.

Walk into your local Barnes and Noble today and I’m not sure whether you’ll find one of my books on the shelf. I actually kind of doubt it. Maybe soon they'll be on the bargain table.

But I’m writing. And that feels good.

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Book Giveaway!

So my book Playing Saint comes out on October 7. Three weeks later, we're having an in-store event at Baker Book House in Grand Rapids. Thankfully, it's shaping up to not be my worst nightmare (i.e., me, card table, stack of my books, sadness), but I'd still love to have more people coming.

SOOOO, I offer this small incentive: if you live close enough to come,  click over to the event page and RSVP. At the end of the week, I will pick four people to receive Advanced Reader Copies of the book, a couple months before it even comes out.

If you live far away from Grand Rapids, I feel sorry for you, but you too can be in the running for a book by tweeting about the book or the event (include my twitter handle, @AuthorZBartels and hasthtag #PlayingSaint).

"But It's Fine the Way It Is . . . "

I’m leading a workshop about indie and traditional publishing at the Breathe Writers’ Conference this October. This is my second year being involved with the conference (sat on an authors’ panel last year) and I’m looking forward to it.

It’s also my wife’s second year leading a workshop. Last year, she spoke about finding the time and space to write (she also wrote a book on the topic, which you can buy here). This year, she’s delivering a talk she’s been working on for some time, on a topic about which she’s very passionate: editing your work. Seriously, that’s what she decided to speak on. Editing.

Now, I suppose that makes sense, considering that, in addition to having been called “[one] of the greatest up-and-coming fiction writers today” by the Saturday Evening Post, she has also worked in the publishing industry for more than a decade, in both editorial and marketing capacities. She loves putting words together, then moving them around, then losing some, then nixing the whole thing and starting over. That’s her idea of a swell time.

She also likes moving furniture around, so there’s that.

I, on the other hand, am the opposite. I like to find the best arrangement right off the bat and leave things be. That couch goes there, and it stays there. That semicolon goes there and I have no intention of moving it. If I didn’t want it there, I wouldn’t have pushed the little key with the semicolon on it. Suffice it to say, editing my writing is not among my favorite pastimes.

Let me just quickly acknowledge that different people work different ways here. Some writers do their best work when they just vomit everything out onto the page and then later sift through it for what’s good, rearrange it, etc., like that one scene in Columbiana with the flashdrive and the puke (which is probably a double-loser of a simile, in that it’s both really gross and also a reference to a movie that only like sixteen people ever saw). Others (people like me) like to work it all out internally, running through every idea, word, and phrase mentally (and, sometimes, orally and aurally, using a digital recorder) before putting anything to paper. And by paper, I of course mean this ten-year-old word processor.

Both methods have strengths and weaknesses, but the major weakness of my school is that we tend to convince ourselves that there is no need to edit. When you’ve lovingly, mentally caressed the words into exactly the right shape (note: we have left the “words as vomit” metaphor behind at this point), you are loathe to change that shape or—μὴ γένοιτο!—slash some words out of existence. And when someone else (say, my editor at HarperCollins) wants to get in there with the mallet and the scalpel, my first instinct is to defend with all necessary force. That’s step one: plant feet, raise battle axe, and shout This is Spartaaaaa! I’m only on my second time through this process, but I can already identify the rest of the steps:

• 2. Remember that I am contractually obligated to go through the editorial process and that everyone has do to it and that I’m not a beautiful-and-unique snowflake.
• 3. Bite the bullet and try to change just enough to appease the editor.
• 4. Realize that the book is getting better.
• 5. Go back through with the editor’s notes, with an actual open mind that these changes (the vast majority anyway) might improve the book.
• 6. Finish the back-and-forth with the editor and discover that the book is far better than the one I originally submitted.

I don’t want to move the couches around, but once they’ve been feng shuied to perfection, I do realize they look better and then I find myself ready to viciously defend the new configuration.

Here’s a couple photos to illustrate. They’re totally extraneous at this point, but they were what initially prompted me to write this post, so it seems a shame not to include them:

This is the south wall of my study. It has looked like this for almost a decade (see also: never moving things around). However, I recently acquired a bunch more books, necessitating more shelves (this little square was pretty much the only wall-space not covered in bookshelves).  I knew I’d need to make room for the coffee maker (and, heck, why not also get an espresso machine?), but the rest of the space would still more than accommodate all my new books. Naturally, I was loathe to mess with it, but when my wife started dropping hints about the stacks of books blocking access to her own new bookshelf at home, I finally jumped in and started the project.

Here’s what it looks like now. Upon surveying the completed project, my first thought was, "Wow! It really looked kind of cluttered and junky before, with all that stuff piled and stacked everywhere." I mean, it was fine the way it was and I was happy to look at it every day, but it’s much better now and I would definitely not click the UNDO button, if that were an option in real life.

So the point is: do yourself a favor. Try a little rearranging. Listen to your editor, your critique group, your beta-readers and just give it a try. You may find that you love it. I mean, not that you love editing. Editing is still the worst. But you may love where it gets you.

You Changed My Title.

So I'm experiencing all this Big Publisher stuff for the first time, firsthand. (My wife works for a major publisher, frequently from home, so I've watched much of the process from a detached distance many times over.) You tell yourself you're going to be ready for the editor's notes and the possibility that they might change your title and not like your cover concept, and you're going to be the least-difficult author they've ever had. 

But then it actually happens. And you feel the little man who lives in your ego poking his head out, saying, "You're wrong; all my ideas are perfect."  <sigh>

The title I wanted for my book was Demoniac. I thought it was punchy, evocative, memorable, etc. They thought it sounded like a horror story (when it's actually a character-driven suspense-slash-action-slash-comedy with supernatural elements). They also thought people would have a hard time pronouncing it (is it a long or short O?) I hated their first alternate suggestion, but tried to get used to it. Then I finally told them I hated it and together we came up with a title we can all love.

The new title is Playing Saint.  It's got layers of meaning (i.e., the main character Parker Saint is acting the part of a Christian and someone else is "playing him" as well). It's punchy, it rolls off the tongue easily, and I think it's fairly memorable.

And here's the thing: it's way better than Demoniac.

The same thing is true about the notes I received from my editor and a freelance editor. Some of them would have changed the essence of the story, so I pushed back on those. Others were obviously great ideas. Still others needed some time to digest and some back-and-forth to refine.  But at the end of the day, it will be far better. The book on bookstore shelves next October will be far and away better than the book that would have existed if I had gone the self-controlled imprint route again.

You may be worried about getting tied to an agent and submitting your work to publishers, afraid that you'll lose control and what comes out at the end of the day won't really be you. But the truth is that it will be the best version of you it can be.

And I think, especially for a Christian, the exercise of letting go and listening to others and letting them improve you, is a vital one and will serve us well in developing our character and refining us as people and as disciples.