I’ve just published my first novel. I began it in 1997.

I was part of a “spirituality group” that imploded from suppressed resentment, unbearable competitiveness and hurt feelings. One evening everyone popped off like a batch of homemade root beer in the basement, one at a time like a series of timed explosions. One woman turned to me and cried, “You’re just like my sister. Why can’t you leave things alone?” It could have been a Saturday Night Live sketch. All these people trying for months to be their version of spiritual and their humanness couldn’t take the pressure. It was the seed of my novel.

I got about 50 pages into a story of which this explosion was to be the climax and got stuck. I put it aside. Over the next ten years I got it out and tried to work with it. Nothing.

Then I wrote my memoir, 99 Girdles on the Wall. The memoir slipped onto the page like a pit from an over-ripe plum. When I had a better grasp of what I was doing, the writing flowed. I certainly knew my life better than anyone else. I had first lived it and then analyzed it in therapy, bringing me to about age 52.

In 2011 when the memoir was published I started my website, Local Dilettante Studio and this blog. I wrote a weekly post for six years before I lost steam. In all that writing, giving myself my own deadlines, my style improved. Plus I was living what was once my highest aspiration: to be a weekly columnist, writing whatever I wanted like George Orwell’s “As I Please.”

My blog posts had recurring characters, principally my long-suffering friends and neighbors who might be at home in a novel. The old idea from 1997 started to cough and clear its throat. My college roommate, Putzer, The Attorney encouraged and occasionally prodded me to start up and then to keep going. She offered to read everything I wanted to send her: notes, character sketches, outlines, drafts. I sent her everything (for years) and she always came back with “Carry on.”

I couldn’t write at home. There were too many distractions. So, once a quarter I went for a week-long retreat on Whidbey Island where I wrote six hours a day. Slowly the book took shape.

Writing a novel became a process of problem solving. I needed characters. I thought of some characters. I sent the character sketches to my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything; she dressed them and gave them cars. It took me the longest time to internalize the fact that my characters weren’t going to do anything unless I made them do it. It wasn’t like a memoir where something had already happened and I just needed to remember it, elaborate on it, or as my Aunt Frances would say, lie about it. I could have them do anything as long as I could make it credible.

I needed a setting. To reduce complications over locale and logistics in the story, I set the novel in my neighborhood and had my own house and garden in mind for the March home.

I needed a structure. I had an idea of several plot lines that I wanted to inter-twine with each other. I read novels and plays, trying to pay attention to the structure of plots. Nothing. Well, nothing that opened the computer and made an outline for me.

I hired an editor (Jennifer D. Munro) who helped me develop my plot ideas and gave me some help with structure. She introduced me to my next problem: Point of View. She analyzed what I had written and demonstrated how I was in and out of every character’s head, including the dog and the cat and without any focus.

I read some tomes about POV. I read short stories, paying attention to point-of-view. I tried my story in first person, didn’t like it.  Finally I chose four characters who would tell the story. Well, four characters and a snake; that is to say the Ouroboros who (loosely) became the narrator when the spirituality group met.

When I decided on who would be telling the story, it finally flowed. The writing went faster and I didn’t have any major roadblocks, just small solvable problems. The last thing I did was read it aloud slowly. This helped me catch awkward sentences and words that were repeated too often. Once I declared it finished, I sent it back to Jennifer who copy-edited it.

If you are writing your first book, don’t skip the copy-edit and don’t confuse it with proof-reading. I had half a dozen proof readers: friends, English majors, retired editors and two people who were prototypes for two of my characters who I mostly wanted to okay things so there wouldn’t be some nasty law suit in my future. The copy-edit is different: little elves standardize things like the spaces between the dots in the ellipses and make sure all the single digit numbers are spelled out. Otherwise your finished book will be like you in the first shirt dress you made in the 1960s, all pressed and fine, and your slip showing.

After the final proof and the copy-edit, you Don’t Touch It. You send it to your next handler. In my case that was my book designer, the inestimable Vlad Verano. He worked his magic with the interiors and the cover design. It was anti-climactic to upload onto the Ingram website but it was a relief for it to out of my hands. There was another round of proofs, both of the print copy and the e-pub. Then there was the excitement of having 100 books delivered to my door, which I chronicled in The Drang Before the Sturm.

The book launch, a huge success, is over. Now I am hustling to line up at least one reading a month because this is how one sells a book, whether it’s traditionally or self-published. The early reviews tell me it’s funny (as planned) and there’s a nice build-up of suspense (one of the problems I learned to solve.) I hope you read it and if you like it, put a review somewhere and tell a friend. Thank you!