TRAJECTORY Finally On Track
It's been a very, very long time coming, but I've just signed the contract for TRAJECTORY, to be published by Anarchy Books later this year.
TRAJECTORY started out as a strange (unpublished) short story I wrote in 1980. I was pretty heavy into Jerzy Kozinski at the time, being very impressed with his compact, fast-moving narrative and often surreal imagery. That story was titled VICTORY ONE IS DEAD.
After finishing the short story, I realized there was the potential for something much larger, and began framing a fairly traditional Cold War espionage tale. I quit my day job to work on it full-time, fully convinced I had a winner, even though I'd never had a work of fiction published. Ah, youth. I researched the book for nearly a year, then began writing.
The first three drafts of the novel, also called VICTORY ONE IS DEAD, were written between 1981 and 1984. None of them was working, and I knew it, partly because I was strongly dissatisfied with the writing itself, and also because the story, the real story it was trying to tell was being buried in artifice.
My original concept for the novel was to be a cross-genre work, a literary espionage tale that was also a psychological thriller, and a philosophical work. One of the biggest helps - and at the same time, obstacles - toward that goal was my going back to school and getting a degree in Philosophy. It was a help because I was exposed to a vast range of ideas and dialogues with historical and contemporary philosophers. It was an obstacle, because my fiction writing became a stilted, academic mess. I had to re-learn how to tell a story, and I have my wife to really thank for teaching me that.
So, I sat on the book for a few of years, attempted a fourth draft in the late '80s, and then shelved it again after re-doing the first 40 pages, when I realized I was repeating the same mistakes I had already made.
Then, in 2007, while going to the grocery store, a little voice told me how to make the book work, and that was the "Aha!" moment when the book transformed into TRAJECTORY.
I'll write more about TRAJECTORY as time goes on.
TRAJECTORY started out as a strange (unpublished) short story I wrote in 1980. I was pretty heavy into Jerzy Kozinski at the time, being very impressed with his compact, fast-moving narrative and often surreal imagery. That story was titled VICTORY ONE IS DEAD.
After finishing the short story, I realized there was the potential for something much larger, and began framing a fairly traditional Cold War espionage tale. I quit my day job to work on it full-time, fully convinced I had a winner, even though I'd never had a work of fiction published. Ah, youth. I researched the book for nearly a year, then began writing.
The first three drafts of the novel, also called VICTORY ONE IS DEAD, were written between 1981 and 1984. None of them was working, and I knew it, partly because I was strongly dissatisfied with the writing itself, and also because the story, the real story it was trying to tell was being buried in artifice.
My original concept for the novel was to be a cross-genre work, a literary espionage tale that was also a psychological thriller, and a philosophical work. One of the biggest helps - and at the same time, obstacles - toward that goal was my going back to school and getting a degree in Philosophy. It was a help because I was exposed to a vast range of ideas and dialogues with historical and contemporary philosophers. It was an obstacle, because my fiction writing became a stilted, academic mess. I had to re-learn how to tell a story, and I have my wife to really thank for teaching me that.
So, I sat on the book for a few of years, attempted a fourth draft in the late '80s, and then shelved it again after re-doing the first 40 pages, when I realized I was repeating the same mistakes I had already made.
Then, in 2007, while going to the grocery store, a little voice told me how to make the book work, and that was the "Aha!" moment when the book transformed into TRAJECTORY.
I'll write more about TRAJECTORY as time goes on.
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