Writing: It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint - My journey to awareness
We had just moved from Syracuse to Charlotte. We had two small children: a two-year-old and a four-year-old, brand-new jobs, and we were all crammed into a small apartment while we hunted for a house. For some reason I thought this would also be the perfect time to start writing a novel. A monumental task since I had no idea how to do it. To make things even more ridiculous, prior to that time period, writing anything, not to mention a book, never crossed my mind. It was never a burning desire or something erupting from inside of me that had to escape onto the written page. Back then, I wanted to be a Cartoonist. My passion was securely grounded in the comic arts field. It's what I was trained to do. The only reason I did a 180-degree turn and decided to write a book was because a friend of mine wrote a humorous non-fiction book and asked me to provide some cartoon illustrations and the cover work. It drew me into a world I found fascinating, and I saw trying my hand at writing as a new challenge. I figured that if my buddy could do it and have some success, then I could too. But non-fiction for me, was out of the question. I enjoyed mysteries so that's what I would write.
Most of the cartoon art projects I worked on were geared towards advertising. I was freelancing and did work for a chain of video stores and an insurance company. I also worked on newspaper comic strip art. All of that used to come easily for me and I was able to knock out the assignments quickly. So, I had the attitude that I could also knock out the great American mystery novel pretty quickly. (I'm going to pause here to give you enough time to stop laughing at that last sentence.)
Like I mentioned, I wanted to write a mystery. I had an idea that was good... or so I thought. After what seemed like an eternity, I finally had my opening sentence. Then I changed it. Then I changed it again. If I'd had any sense, I would've stopped right there and turned the ballgame on instead. But I didn't stop. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. That I could actually write a book.
With my other obligations, I was never able to nail down a consistent time that worked best for writing. I found myself scribbling in little notebooks in the bathroom at my job. For a short time, I tried getting up a couple hours early in the morning to write before getting ready for work. I wrote in the evenings after everyone went to bed. It took me several months to "knock out" three and a half chapters. I wasn't even close to "knocking out" an entire a book yet. I was frustrated with my progress and the quality of the writing I was producing. My whodunnit mystery novel was turning out to be much harder to write than I ever imagined. It was also far from being a mystery. Apparently, I was writing a whydonnit and there wasn't a lot of mystery involved. I ended up shelving the whole project and settled into raising kids and making a living outside the creative field for the next twenty years.
Sometime around 2015, I pulled the manuscript off the shelf and decided to try again. 1995 was a different time so, the first thing I needed to do was figure out how I was going to get what I'd already written off the floppy disc it was on. Once I had that accomplished it was time to see if I could turn it into a book. It ended up taking me another two years, but the results of that effort became Dead is Forever, the first novel in my Tony Razzolito, PI series. I kept the original premise and turned that first book into more of a novice private investigator coming of age story. As I sit here typing this, I feel pretty darn good about my writing journey. I just released book four in the Razzman Mystery Crime Files series, staring Tony Razzolito, PI.
My biggest takeaway from this journey is that writing a book is not a hop, skip, and a jump. It is hard work that requires research and the ability to tell a good story. I have nothing but the highest respect for anyone who writes, whether for a living (part time or fulltime), or as a hobby. There is a silent bond between every writer because we are all aware of what it really takes to write and finish one book, let along more than one, for it is truly a marathon and nowhere near a sprint.
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