You wake up one day and pat yourself on the back. I’ve written two novels. What about a third?
Hmm. Let me ponder this a moment. Book #1. I’m a life-long Civil War nut. There are millions of us lurking about with this I’m-not-so-certain-about-this obsession. Healthy? Lover of history? Nut job? Too late now. I wrote it. You be the judge.
Book #2. Ponder some more. Write something contemporary and in the hope for larger sales, target this book for the widest fiction reading demographic. Middle-age women. Beth’s Book has a 49 y/o protagonist. That fits that bill.
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A year after Beth’s Book, with sales for both my novels flat and minimal, what do I do now?
I had some fun writing my first two novels. Genuinely. I also spent countless hours researching, interviewing my characters to help me get unstuck, monumental hopes and dreams (mostly dashed in terms of outward success), countless outlines and accessed parts of myself I was glad to discover. Don’t give up.
And my third novel? This is what was important to me.
Write it for fun. Take all the restrictions off. A book that would require no research. No outlining. No agonizing over just the right detail. So away I went diving into the deep end of the pool of prose fiction without any pool toys. Sink or swim.
I wrote Never Trust A Hero at the tail end of the George W. Bush years. War criminals ran our country and spread death and mayhem all over the world for the benefit of Exxon, Haliburton and that entire world known as the Military-Industrial-Complex. (Later, I read they left out the third element in that description: military, industrial, media complex. A good addition, I thought.)
History has taught us that satire is one of the ways to cope with unrelenting tragedy and horror and hold onto some semblance of sanity. Even the Greeks did it—and well.