It's been awhile since I wrote in this space, so I thought I'd pass along a little update over what I've been doing this past year.
Last spring, just as Covid was beginning to look like a long term issue, I began working on the first book of my own in ten years. The title is TAKING PARIS. It's about World War II. I love it. It's the kind of fast-paced history you read at the beach. No skimping on the details or the action.
Taking the leap back into the solo world was scary. Bill O' and I have developed a shorthand over the past twelve years co-authoring the Killing series. I rough out the research in linear fashion and then Bill polishes, crafting the story and adding his own writing. Our process — me in California and Bill in New York — is a simple back and forth that involves lengthy hours on the phone, editing word-by-word and line-by-line.
Now, I'm of the belief that I have the best gig in publishing. I write books with a famous co-author whose friendship I enjoy enormously, get my name on the cover, immerse myself in research and writing five days a week (sometime six, but there's always one day where I shut down), get paid well, never get bothered in the grocery store like authors who are actually famous, and never do a lick of publicity. Above all, it's fun.
And then there's my shadow career.
I've always had a policy, born of my freelance magazine days, of taking every writing job that came along — with the exception of those I found morally or ethically troubling. So even in the midst of turning out a Killing book each year, I have still made time for shadow assignments as a ghost writer. This is different from co-authoring in that my name was never on the cover. You will find my fingerprints on a few bestsellers you might have read in the last decade, and maybe recognized a turn of phrase, but my voice and name are not to be found. Yes, it is soul-sucking work. But a quick payday is a quick payday. The ghost books paid college tuitions, landscaped my backyard, and let me fly business. Yet ghosting was work, and hardly fun.
Back when I blew off classes in college, drove to the beach, parked my chair in the sand and spent the afternoon reading Hemingway, Wolfe, and Thompson — all the while dreaming of making it as a writer — nothing inside me thought it sounded romantic to write books for self-help gurus.
So this year I took the pledge: no more ghostwriting. I will co-author books with Bill O' as long as I am able. The process is rigorous and joyful at once, and who can argue with 18 million books in print? And I am also pursuing solo projects. However, my days of ghosting are over.
I digress. Back to Taking Paris.
I love this book. I'd have to go back over my journals to be sure, but I'm pretty sure I began writing the first chapter almost exactly a year ago. The process was horrible at first, a paragraph a day at most, struggling to find my voice. After three months work I still had less than fifty pages. My deadline was November 1, then December 1, and then just a wish that I would finish. I gambled with sentence structure in a way I have never done before. I took chances on the page, banishing that critical voice inside my head telling me I couldn't do this or that. I accepted that not everyone will love my darling the way I do. I began a new habit of printing out the last twenty pages I'd written, then editing them at dawn, cup of coffee at my elbow, on the pine farm table in my backyard. Just me, the pen, the pages, and the rising sun. And Django, of course, my beloved hound. I grew to love the process so much that I never wanted it to end. With just two chapters to go, finish line in sight, I even took a couple days off, not wanting that particular writing experience to be over. That has never happened before and it may never happen again.
But I found my voice. I found a new way to write history. I set aside my fears and pushed myself in a new direction. Bill O' was kind enough to give the manuscript an early read and offer a blurb for the cover. Taking Paris was supposed to be released on November 2 of this year, but a couple other big titles made for too much competition. We pushed back to October 5, before it was announced that the new Killing book would be published the same day(!). Then we moved all the way back to September 7, which is exactly where I want to be. The link is already up on Amazon. You can pre-order now.
There's my update. Hope you're all well.