Steven S. Drachman's Blog, page 7

... an ambitious and well-realised tale of American life

Indie Bookspot had some nice things to say about The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh a couple of weeks ago. I've been working on the sequel and trying not to Google myself compulsively every day, so I didn't notice it for a while, but it was gratifying to see that my book is spreading its wings and flying (across the Atlantic in this case, I believe) without my actively promoting it. You can read the review here.

It's a pretty new site, but it has a lot of stuff every day on the publishing industry and information, articles and reviews of interest to Indie writers and readers, and I would recommend it even if they hadn't said nice things about me, so please do take a look here.

A Word of Thanks

I think it's generally discouraged on GoodReads for authors to contact their readers directly and personally; so I just wanted to send out a word of thanks to everyone who has read my book, and especially to everyone who has rated or reviewed it, even if you've been critical. I've appreciated it.

I will be thinking of both the things you've liked and the things I can do better as I to try to finish Book 2, and I will do my best to meet your expectations. I have been listening to you closely, and I've appreciated your encouragement and attention.

By all means, feel free to email me - I would love to hear from you. But in the meantime, I just wanted to say thanks.

How to be An Obsessive Compulsive Indie Author

So I wrote a science fiction western historical fantasy, The Ghosts of Watt O’Hugh , and according to the critics – those who have looked at it – it’s a good book. (Kirkus Reviews named it as one of the best of 2011, as you may have heard me mention about a thousand times, if you are a regular reader of my blog, or someone who knows me at all, or someone who was just unlucky enough to be introduced to me at Kiddush anytime in the last couple of months.) Happily, it’s the first book of a planned trilogy, and my next book seems good so far, at least to me – it’s got some surprising time travel, a gunfight in Death Valley, a visit to 枉死城, which I believe loosely translates as the Chinese “City of the Innocent Dead” (a really nasty place in the underworld that, surprisingly, has a bakery with delicious moon cakes), a rip-snorting train robbery, a magical Montana rabbi, and more from that dastardly and evil mathematician, Leopold Kronecker.

Less happily, it sometimes seems that an “Indie” author makes a choice between writing books and selling books.

Since my novel was published in July, I’ve queried numerous bloggers, followed up with those who agreed to review my book, and gave interviews to every website and newspaper that would talk to me. I have flown to every bookstore that would have me, near and far, and did what I could to publicize it. I’ve posted updates for everyone on my Facebook list, and my GoodReads list, and my Linked-In list, and anyone who checks in with my website. I pop by the local bookstores to see if they’re out of stock. With the help of my cover artist, I’ve designed my own publicity, from web ads to posters, which I’ve taped and tacked on the street and in coffee shops from Brooklyn to Maine. I’ve written guest posts for other bloggers, anyone who would have me. When my novel was chosen as one of the best of the year by Kirkus Reviews (as you may have heard me mention before), I emailed everyone who kind of likes me, and maybe everyone who has ever pretended to like me. I recently quit my job, and in my goodbye email, I reminded everyone that, if they missed me, they could always purchase my book, available on Amazon and at your local bookstore. My sales briefly rose, which was gratifying.

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ON JACKIE CHAN, DRUNKEN MASTER PART 2, ISHBEL ROSS AND PEGGY AND PAUL AND LADDY

Well, this article isn’t really about Jackie Chan or Drunken Master Part 2 – not entirely – but sort of about the concept of “immortality". I wrote a couple of articles about Jackie Chan, back in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. I interviewed him for the Chicago Sun-Times and for Entertainment Weekly, and as a result, I am mentioned periodically alongside one of the giants of moviedom, and every day, googling fanboys (and fangirls) come across my name, and though it may not register for long, my connection with the immortal Jackie Chan seemed to have given me a little bit of residual immortality. For the record, he is a great guy, and you can easily find my old articles on him on the web, with a swift google here or there. (In fact, I am hoping a little bit that the title of this post will get me a few more hits than my usual blogging effort. I will report back on that later.) But then this past Friday, I mentioned Jackie Chan in front of my daughter’s eight-year-old friend, and she had never heard of him. My immortality snuffed out, just like that, in one generation.

And this, of course, reminded me of Ishbel Ross, a famous writer you’ve never heard of. More than 20 years ago, when vacationing in Maine with my wife and another couple (now divorced), I came across a dusty novel in a cluttered, used bookstore. The outrageousness of Marriage in Gotham – which the jacket describes as “a thoroughly modern study of the divorce problem” – cannot be underestimated. In the late 1920s, when the beautiful and “charming” Henrietta Tullock – the wealthy wife of an old school architect – shares a cab with Allan Meadows, her daughter’s boyfriend, they discover that her casual bigotry matches his completely (they share an irrational hatred and fear of midgets), and the result is a love that cannot be denied, at least for a while. Long enough to create a media scandal, to wreck the Tullock marriage and to send the young Tullock daughter into the welcoming arms of another woman. Then comes the Great Depression and one terrible facelift for Henrietta. The utter and hilarious charmlessness of the novel’s wealthy characters is matched only by the certainty with which they all insist on each other’s evident and tremendous charm.

What a book! Beautifully written, feverish, bizarre and bizarrely sympathetic. I went hunting for Ms. Ross’s great commercial and critical success, her first novel, which was entitled Promenade Deck. It wasn’t until the advent of the internet that I managed to put my hands on it, and it too is a loopy masterpiece, and this time an entirely successful one. Well-heeled passengers on a luxury cruise around the world see the sights, along with scandal, adultery, suicide, tragedy, and one flapper who gets drunk and dives naked into an empty swimming pool. It is ridiculous, yet it also achieves a certain level of greatness and lyric beauty. Like Marriage in Gotham, the characters are reprehensible stereotypes of their age, but sympathetic and fully formed creations nevertheless.

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A little recognition, late in life ....

Well, Billy Crystal didn't announce it in front of a crowd of tuxedo-clad movie stars, but this morning my novel, The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh, was named to Kirkus Reviews' Best of 2011. That's the year end list of the best books of the last 12 months.

You can read all about it here.

I'm a little bit speechless, but I will have more to say on this topic soon.

The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh

A Dispatch from my Author Tour

I’m just back from Colorado and Wyoming, where I had author events at some of the spots where the book actually took place. In Laramie, Wyoming, I read from the book in the actual prison where Watt O’Hugh was locked up (it’s now a museum), and an enthusiastic group braved a terrible snowstorm and made me feel welcome and at home. The snowstorm made the reading feel more realistic, somehow, since, in the book, Watt lived in the prison during the winter of 1875.

The Laramie Boomerang ran a feature article about me and my book. In Leadville, Colorado, where Watt O’Hugh met Oscar Wilde and battled deadlings in the street, I got great coverage in the Democrat-Gazette (which also pointed out a factual error - thanks!) and was very excited to see the local bookstore window filled with copies of Watt O’Hugh. Walking down those streets, in many ways unchanged since the events that the book recounts, was strange and exciting for me. (Of course, walking down those streets at an altitude of 10,000 feet left me worse than winded.)

Most exciting for me was seeing cell #17 at the Laramie prison, which was Watt’s cell in 1875. It made me feel as though Watt O’Hugh weren’t just a fictitious character after all. Of course, he is a fictitious character, but there was something about seeing that cell that made me feel as though Watt had really lived there.

I'll have more thoughts on this soon.

I'm an Indie Author ....?

I learned about a year ago that my mother’s grandfather - Professor Allen Johnson - was a prominent historian of the very early 20th century. His books – including a Jefferson biography – are still available in print on demand format from numerous venues, including one publisher aptly named “Forgotten Books”. He died in 1930, hit by a car, and I don’t even own a photograph of him, but after reading his books, I have a bit of a sense of what he was like, at least inside his head. Funny, effortlessly knowledgeable. Probably interesting to talk to; at least that’s how I’ll remember him. Another great-grandfather was a prominent rabbi of the late 19th/ early 20th century, and his autobiography is also available on print on demand. He was outspoken and stern, and the woman who was his first great love was deported to Poland, many years after he last saw her. Another ancestor on my mother’s side, Jenny Slocum, left behind a slim volume, which was posthumously published privately in 1909 as Grandmother Slocum’s Stories, and which recounted my family’s earliest ancestors in America. According to her, my family fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War, battled pirates, and socialized with John Hancock. Grandmother Slocum was a good storyteller and as modest as it was possible to be, considering everything.

I finished writing my novel, The Ghosts of Watt O’Hugh in mid-2011. What I had written, I think, has great popular potential, but it is a literary Western historical fantasy novel, with a dash of magical realism. I am at the age of sudden heart attacks, and worse (and there is always the memory of that car that felled Professor Johnson), and so I didn't want to spend the next year convincing agents and publishing houses, especially when there was another option available to me. I wanted to leave behind a little volume on the shelves for any descendants who might care to know me, as I now know my great-grandfathers and Grandmother Slocum, and my book would do all that - it reflects my voice and my view of the world. This tome on the shelf would make me feel better about myself at work, as I sat beneath those popping, buzzing fluorescent lights.

So out it went, and to my surprise and joy, I’ve gotten good reviews and even some nice sales. Suddenly I am an Indie author, rather than just a guy self-publishing a book for his kids.

I am part of the Indie community?

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ON WESTERN-FANTASY NOVELS

My new novel, The Ghosts of Watt O’Hugh, features a hero born in 1842. A former orphan of New York’s slums, and a Civil War veteran, Watt O’Hugh does what many young desperate men from the 19th century East did – he goes West. He works on a cattle run, fights a range war, becomes a dime novel hero then an outlaw, all the time determined to save Lucy Billings, the socialite-with-a-past whom he loved and lost in New York City before the War. I carefully researched the history and delivered a rip-roaring Western adventure.

So far so good, except that I also delivered a novel filled with what I like to call the Magic of the old West. So while one blogger calls my book “a Western with some flashy fantasy heels” an Amazon reviewer stated flatly, “Despite the cover art and the main settings, this isn't really a ‘western’ or ‘cowboy’ book … It's sci-fi and fantasy mixed up in the vein of Vonnegut.” He liked it; but to like it, he had to deny that it was a Western.

Is Watt O’Hugh a “real” Western? And, more importantly to those of us who love and revere Westerns, is the mini-trend in which I am playing a small role – mixing a Western setting with science fiction/fantasy elements (or even with magical realism, á la Gabriel García Márquez) – good or bad for the survival of the genre?

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How to Spend (Almost) 20 Years Writing a Book

Watt O’Hugh III is an interesting fellow, at least to me; a 19th century orphan from New York’s desperate Five Points slum; a Wyoming gunman and dime novel hero; a Wild West showman; a Time Roamer, doomed to know the day of his own death. A superstitious, damaged Civil War veteran who believes, rightly or wrongly, that his tremendous skills with a 45 can be explained only by the ghosts who swarm around him, protecting him from harm and guiding his shots (when his cause is just). And a cowboy still desperately and impossibly in love with Lucy Billings, the New York Socialite-with-a-Past that he loved and lost a decade ago, and who’s vanished somewhere in China.

Watt O’Hugh has been on my mind for a long time.

Back in the 1990s, I was a journalist writing about movies for a number of papers, interviewing film stars (and lots of starlets, mostly from Europe for some reason, with the occasional Jackie Chan and Leonardo DiCaprio tossed into the mix), when my agent asked me to try my hand at a fantasy novel. Before long, the two of us dreamed up Watt O’Hugh. For a few months, back then, I found myself living in the 19th century. In 1874, in New York City (a place and time that, by now, I could lead you through with ease), I rode the El, strolled past the junk shops on Chatham Street and lunched at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the one torn down in 1908; and in Leadville, Colorado, I peered nervously at State Street’s infamous gambling dens. Various personalities of the age lived at our house, from J.P. Morgan to Oscar Wilde! I spoke to Western historians; one suggested the Wyoming Territorial Prison as a place to lock up O’Hugh when his luck went south; another, Elnore L. Frye, taught me how to break out of the same prison and to swim through the icy waters of the Laramie River.

Other than the Magic – the Time roaming, the women of the dark arts, and a dragon or two – the novel I was writing was really very historically accurate.

Two-thirds of the book spilled out of me like a dream, as quickly as I could type. I skipped ahead to the last scene, a sunset-bathed portrait of tired lovers at the edge of a cliff, storm clouds churning overhead. How did they get there, and what did it mean? I didn’t know. A major publisher came calling. So did a Hollywood producer; in Burbank’s CBS commissary, I joined him for turkey tetrazini. (He has since gone on to great things.) I guess life couldn’t have been better. And the turkey tetrazini was actually pretty good.

But fortune has a way of turning. Business relationships crumbled, friendships ended, and I didn’t finish my book. I stopped writing altogether, moved into an office on Wall Street, negotiated some deals. While there was a certain art to that, over the years (decades, actually!) I couldn’t quite forget about O’Hugh and his great, tragic love for the New York socialite Lucy Billings, the vast Western landscape that threatened always to swallow him alive, and that last romantic scene, with its unanswered questions.

Well, my wife and some friends who had read my unfinished tome over the years sat me down and told me that enough was enough. Just put this thing on Kindle, and print on demand, one said, and at least I will finally get to learn how the damn thing turns out. My little daughters urged me to write them a book. One friend offered to draw the cover art. What he came up with, in my opinion, is both beautiful and haunting. A real book cover. So I took some time off from work, and Watt O’Hugh came back to visit like an old, long-lost friend and told me the rest of his story. By the time I was done, I realized ruefully, I had averaged about ten pages a year! Still, I'd finished.

But what, I wondered, is a self-published book, anyway? Is it really a "book"? Is it really “published”? An old-school publishing guy, I intended to keep my mouth shut and hope no one noticed that I had a book out there. My friends could have their closure, and my daughters could have a strange fantasy/adventure novel, written by their old man and dedicated to them, to put on their bookshelves, to re-read as old women, and to give to their grandkids. But early reaction has been gratifying, hopeful. Maybe Watt O’Hugh belongs to the world after all? Maybe he was always meant to live his marvel-filled life as a self-published dime novel hero. Maybe his audience will find him? Anyway, I hope so.

[Note: This essay originally appeared, in slightly modified form, on the Readaholic website.]

On Writing What You Know

It’s with a little nervousness as well as excitement that I plan author events this Fall that will take me, among other places, to Laramie, Wyoming, and Leadville, Colorado, two cities I write about (quite fantastically) in my historical science fiction novel, The Ghosts of Watt O’Hugh.

I have never been to Laramie, and Leadville only briefly, if at all, long ago.

At one point early in the novel, my 19th century hero, the titular Watt O’Hugh, finds himself locked up in Laramie’s territorial prison, planning a jailbreak. Near the end, he has a harrowing time in bustling, gilded, silver-rush era Leadville, from which he only narrowly escapes. In fact, my Laramie reading will take place in the very prison where O’Hugh is incarcerated (it’s now a museum). What did I get wrong? I am sure they will let me know!

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