Daniel’s next novel (for real!)
Years ago, at a family reunion-type thing, I was standing on the beach and talking to a family friend who worked in publishing. I would probably name her directly in this — I’m pretty shameless that way — if I had any memory of who she was. But I don’t. What I do remember is telling her that I wanted to write novels.
“Okay,” she said with a nod, “do you have a manuscript?”
I told her I did.
“Good, good,” she said. “First thing to do is throw that away.”
Her point was that good writing comes from experience, and the first book you crank out is just practice, like the first rehearsal for a play. It was not a bad point. I will readily concede that. It also made me … not mad, because I don’t really do mad in that way, but peeved. I don’t give up on things like that. So I submitted it a few places.
And got categoric rejections across the board.
At the same time, I was working on what would become After Life, which eventually did become my first novel (and second, if you think a republish counts). It’s on its third publisher, counting its abbreviated tenure under contract with an initial-but-unscrupulous publisher that let me out of my deal, and it now has a sequel en route (and a third book in the series coming if I ever, you know, get the damn thing written), plus there was a prequel companion book I sent out as an ebook to people who bought the republish.
But that first book was always there. I liked the story, dammit. It’s nothing like After Life or its series, with no sci-fi aspects at all. It’s just a slice of life, the story of a group of high-school friends and their friends and teachers over the course of a few days, starting with a Saturday party and going through the following Tuesday morning. Nothing that significant happens with any of them, but at the end they’ve all changed — or very pointedly not changed in some instances. It’s young adult-y, to be sure (not written for middle schoolers or anything, but it is primarily about the day-to-day lives of high-schoolers), but there is a whole world of characters in this, at least 20 that are fairly realized to one extent or another, and I’m pretty proud of the world I’ve built in it, even if there’s more than a little autobiographical component going on here.
I kept coming back to it. Every year or so, I’d work up a couple queries, send it out, and get nothing. But I kept teasing it and tweaking it. And about a month ago, when my After Life publisher mentioned some openings in the schedule, it occurred to me that they don’t do only zombie/horror work, and I could give that a shot. So I did.
They expressed interest in the whole book. I sent it along. And then I got impatient. Wednesday was my birthday, so I DM’d the one responsible for the decision to be like, “Hey, uh, have you had a chance to read?” Which I’m sure was extremely annoying, but she replied to say that she was reading, she was liking, and she was accepting it.
So that’s the story, really. I’ve written a few zombie books, have another that I really need to finish (somebody come babysit for me), and now I’m branching out with what is currently (maybe permanently) titled Or Consequences. The main characters are a pair of friends named Rick and Amie, but there’s also Joe and Andy, and Mary and Elaine, and Donnie and his dad, and Mitch and Stacy, and Jamal and Jarrodd, and Krystal and Bobby, and Becky, and Carp, and Coach Langella, and … listen, there are a lot of characters in this thing, and they’re all a lot of fun, and trust me when I tell you that you won’t guess how it’s going to play out.
I don’t know when it’s going to be out yet. I expect that’ll be figured out soon enough. And while I don’t remember who it was who told me the first book I wrote was trash, practice for the next one, and she was giving me genuinely good advice, there’s still a small part of me that wants to find her and say “In your face.”
I mean, I won’t. But I kind of want to.