July 20, 2005
I doubt if there is a novelist or aspiring novelist (I hate the term pre-published and won't use it) whose moods don't go up and down like Disney's The Tower of Terror based entirely on what's going on in their writing life.

Try as I might to be cheerful and upbeat about last Friday's book signing, it's kind of hard to stay that way in the face of reality. Book signings are rather anachronistic anyway. I mean, if you're the hot writer with the hot book, people will flock to the signing. If you're an unknown and/or it's your first novel, they probably won't. The whole phenomenon is rather odd to my mind anyway--I think I've gone to one book signing in my life to get an autographed copy of a book. That was by Tom Kakonis, and I went because I had written him a letter about how much I enjoyed his first novel, "Michigan Roll," and he wrote back and we had started a correspondence. But aside from that, I prefer just to read the books, not hound the authors.

So, whether I should or not, I was having some second thoughts about the whole fiction deal this weekend because of the book signing. Let's be clear here--I love writing fiction. It's an absolute passion. And I love my career as a nonfiction freelance writer. It's the selling of books, not the writing part, that can drive you nuts. The amount of time and energy involved is staggering and the results are practically invisible--there are undoubtedly results, but identifying them and seeing them is what's difficult. So I was in one of my, "if-this-fiction-thing-doesn't-go- somewhere-with-the-next-two-books-maybe-I-should-just- concentrate-on-the-nonfiction-business-and-take-up-the- guitar-and-join-a-gym" moods. [And to be fair, I visited my mother this weekend who is very, very sick, undoubtedly affecting my mood].

But then I asked Ashley, one of my agents, where we are with Bad Intentions, the follow-up to Dirty Deeds. She came back with the fact that the manuscript is presently at Simon & Schuster, Berkley, Viking and Thomas Dunne. It's summer and all the editors at at "the shore" but we should hear something one way or another soon. And even though all four may very well shoot it down, I found this extremely cheering and my mood lifted.

We writers are screwed. Admit it!

Best,
Mark Terry