Remember back to those heady days of high school science fiction? After reading everything I could get my hands on, mostly set off-world or in make-believe worlds, I decided I wanted to write science fiction stories, too. I wielded a non-electric Smith-Corona typewriter in those days and typed out all kinds of stories late into the night. Father was happy to hear the constant clicking of keys all evening but Mother had to knock on my door repeatedly and tell me to go to sleep. But I couldn't stop. I had stories the world needed to read.
My longest typewritten effort was a "1984" rip-off that went 66 pages, single-spaced. I double-stapled the pages together and passed it around among my circle of science fiction aficionados at my high school. Of course they loved it. That was not a time for criticism. I was encouraged to write more. One story I wrote was probably the result of cross-pollination of four stories I had read, likely by Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, and Isaac Asimov. Who can say for sure now?
That story had a regular guy - an adult, rather than a teenager - fighting with himself over a monster that torments him every night, haunting his dreams. (Shades of teen angst?) To rid himself of the unpleasantness of his sleeping hours, he becomes determined to go kill that monster. The problem is that the monster lives on another planet. Also, people on Earth think he is crazy and so he is locked away. (More teen angst, no doubt.) But in the futuristic setting, anything is possible and he does escape and boards a spaceship for a hunting expedition on an alien planet. I titled the story "Doubles".
I used that story in a Creative Writing class in college and got all kinds of constructive criticism. I got a B overall on it, along with praise for my great imagination. The professor suggested that I relocate the story to Earth because, with the amazing setting of the original story, what the protagonist does doesn't seem so difficult - and we want the protagonist to struggle. So I took my 35-page single-spaced typewritten manuscript and did a very hard rewrite to set the story on Earth. I thought of what creature on Earth would be close to the monster on that alien planet and I came up with... a Bengal tiger.
I tried. I really did. But such a drastic shift proved too daunting for a typewriter, even the refurbished IBM Selectric my parents got for me for Christmas. However, graduation and a return to college to learn something else gave me the opportunity I needed. I took a Screenwriting course with an adjunct professor who had worked in Hollywood. We all had dreams of getting a movie deal from our screenplays. (I actually got my "1984" rip-off turned into a screenplay optioned for a year; then the script was dropped.) I used what I learned in class on my "Doubles" novella and it became a feature film screenplay.
Long after the class had ended, I was still working on that screenplay. With my parents away on summer vacation, I pushed myself to finish the remake of the hunting story, staying awake 5 hours and sleeping 3 hours...for five straight days. I thought I would be famous just for that determined effort. Fortunately, the result was a fully reset story opening in New York City and ending in India with a tiger as the antagonist. I was proud to have made the switch - even though it was no longer science fiction. Later I would learn about the genre called "magical realism" and feel much better about the whole project.
But wait! Not even close to half way yet. Not getting any interest from Hollywood, I realized I should turn the screenplay into a novel. The prospect of crunching out 60,000 words scared me. That's why a screenplay was so much better to attempt. Now I just had to fill in the scenes that were already outlined in the screenplay. Easy-peasy. Of course I worked on other stories through all of this, plus I was working at a full-time job, too. Life took a lot of my time but I returned and returned again to the "novel" many times during my young adulthood.
When I got the opportunity to live in Hawaii (Thanks, U.S. Army!), the tropical scenery sparked my imagination and the writing of the novel progressed rapidly. (Yes, I could not put my writing on hold for several months of full-time duty, so I packed my manual typewriter and a spare ink ribbon cartridge in my suitcase and my fellow soldiers in the barracks enjoyed the key-slamming after duty hours almost every night.) Out in the wild areas of Oahu, I could see a tiger and feel what it would be like to hunt and be hunted. When I returned home, I was close to finishing the manuscript. When I did, I sought an agent for what I had renamed YEAR OF THE TIGER, having learned about the oriental calendar while in Hawaii.
In those days of yore, still pre-internet, we printed out the manuscript, double-spaced, and put it all in a box and included return postage if we wanted it returned. (Later, agents would state up-front that they would "recycle" the manuscript rather than send it back.) Mailing a box of paper cost about $25 at the time, plus the $25 in postage stamps for the return, slipped inside the box - with a self-addressed stamped envelope for the letter accepting or rejecting the manuscript, sent separately from the 4th class postage returned box of paper. Sending that baby around took a lot of time (6 months was average) and costs added up.
Finally I got an agent who was interested and, after paying a modest reading fee because I was an unknown author, they offered to represent my novel to publishers. Hot diggity dog! My agent tried for a year to push it, then gave up. A list of criticisms had to be addressed. I fixed everything and sent it back - but that's not how real life works. No do-overs. Once rejected, always rejected. So I put the manuscript away and worked on other things. I let life take over, let it come close to ruining me. I moved on to other science fiction stories - and in my MFA program also contemporary, literary stories to broaden my oeuvre.
Much happened. Then, in 2011, I got excited by Amazon's novel competition (ABNA) and submitted what I thought was my best novel, A BEAUTIFUL CHILL, a campus relationship story that was my MFA thesis. I got a little ways through the competition before failing. Next year, same deal, different novel. I went sci-fi, using my interdimensional novel THE DREAM LAND, and got a little further before failing. But I got noticed and - long story highly shortened - I hooked up with a publishing group and my first novel, AFTER ILIUM, a contemporary adventure with age-gap romance and an exotic setting, which had been rewritten from a novella inspired by a graduate course in Classical rhetoric, was published. Thus, I was encouraged to go back to my manuscripts and see what else would be good to publish.
I gave them a good revision and sent them off. I finished a long-forgotten book and I wrote completely new books in several genre. But YEAR OF THE TIGER still sat on the shelf while newer ideas took my attention. When I went to Beijing, China to teach a summer class at a university there, I had plenty of idle time in my hotel room. I had seen the sites on two previous vacation trips so my desire to write and revise was stronger than my desire to go out in the smog and heat to see places I had already seen. So I took out that manuscript - on my laptop - and read & revised. It was pretty good in this iteration, just needed some polishing, some tightening. I felt it was ready to go.
But then I got involved with the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) competition and started something new. I put the tiger tale aside. A couple years later, I returned to it and gave it one more pass. A beta reader had some concerns so I addressed them. Magical realism covered some of them. My earlier research on India and tiger behavior was supposed to cover others. But I double-checked everything anyway. I checked the characters' accents, too: American, British, Scottish, Australian, and Hindi. (I'm a linguist, after all.) I decided on a new format which, I felt, would make the story more mythical - the "magical" part of magical realism.
Put it aside again to work on EXCHANGE, a contemporary crime thriller, based on an idea that suddenly hit me in 2019. I had to work on it Right Then! Ok, now it is YEAR OF THE TIGER's turn to hit the websites. For reals. It's finally going to happen. The long-awaited second-cousin of my all novels....
In fact, it was the first novel-length manuscript I ever produced. I did have a long post-nuclear apocalypse story (call it a novella) prior to YEAR OF THE TIGER. As an early work of mine, it is a favorite; perhaps that was the reason I keep returning to this story of madness in its many forms. There is a deeply human element embedded in the story which I kept pulling out a little more with each revision. I like how its beauty juxtaposes its visceral aspects. I like the obsession of its characters. I like the final twists. Now it is ready.
NEXT: The Blurb
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Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.
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