Writers Are Not Machines

I was once at a party and someone asked me what I was working on. I said, “Nothing. I published my 25th book last Fall. I’m taking time off.” He looked at me like I was a slacker or something. But that’s not an unusual response.

I was a member of the same health club for over two decades and lots of people there read my Nick Hoffman mysteries set in a college town not unlike East Lansing. No matter when I published a book in the series, someone would always ask, “So when’s the next one coming out?” As if I was supposed to be churning them out—maybe with the help of a team of interns or androids….

And telling people that I had just published a book in the past year or two didn’t seem to penetrate. I got blank stares. What was wrong with me, was I lazy?

Okay, publishing 27 books in different genres over the last 30+ years isn’t shabby--but they haven’t come out on any sort of regular basis. Some years I haven’t published anything and one year I published three different books just because that’s how the publishers’ schedules worked out.

In case that sounds like I’m Type A, I should explain that my second non-mystery novel took almost twenty years to finish. Yes, twenty, working on and off because I kept re-conceiving it. I’m glad I did, because The German Money got one of the best reviews of my life. The Washington Post compared me to Kafka, Philip Roth and John le Carré and I was sent on book tours in England and Germany to promote the editions published there.

But some mysteries have taken me only six months from concept to completion for various reasons. And another book was fairly easy to put together because it was a collection of already-published essays. So it’s all highly unpredictable.

You can’t explain that to the cheerful guys who call you “Dude!” and ask about your next book while you’re on the way to the showers just wearing a towel and flip-flops. Or people who decide to chat with you while you’re sweating on the treadmill or in the sauna. Or the people who think that popping out another book can’t be that difficult since it’s not like I have a real job, anyway.

Maybe I should have asked them, “So, when are you doing your next brain surgery?” or “When’s your next super-messy divorce case?’ or “When’s your next multi-million-dollar real estate deal?”

Lev Raphael’s ripped-from-the-headlines suspense novel Assault With a Deadly Lie was a Midwest Book Award Finalist. It deals with police militarization and brutality and he worked on it for about five years.

Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay