NEW BOOK: 'SEARCHING FOR SUZIE SUNSHINE'

Jan. 8, 2019

Writing novels is a lot of work, not all of it fruitful. I have quite a few projects lying around that I'm not happy with. Mostly drafts of novels. I imagine a lot of writers have such a backlog. It's like having race horses that have injuries and are out on "injured reserve."

One of these novels is set in the world of horse racing. It involves an old horse trainer, Rafael "Sonny" Sonnenschein, from Kansas. His daughter Susan ran away from home when she was sixteen, after her parents got divorced. Her mother had an affair and her father threw her mother out.

Sonny has been looking for Suzie Sunshine, as her friends at school called her, and finds a lead in Los Angeles years later.

I know that much. But I don't know how many years it's been that he has been searching for her, in this new version.

I want him to find her, or find out what happened to her. I have many different versions of the story -- twenty , so far. The most recent is 93,000 words and 442 pages long. But none of these versions worked for me.

I am the first reader I try to please.

As you can see, I have spent a lot of time and effort on this story.

I am hoping this new version will work better.

I really like this character, Sonny. In the first chapter, he meets a young woman who reminds him of his daughter. I like her, too.

Wish me luck.
More later.

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Jan. 9, 2019

I woke up thinking about Suzie Sunshine. One difference between this story and "The Disappearance of Maggie Collins" is that Sonny is not a cop.

Sonny has a personal stake in finding his little girl. (Not so little anymore.) But it is not his job. He doesn't have a lot of resources. He doesn't have the NYPD behind him. He's on his own.

He's been traveling for ten years looking for Suzie. But he has also been making a living. He takes his race horses with him, and his crew, a groom, a hot-walker, and an exercise rider. He races, he wins, he loses, he has to keep his team together. He has to keep his horses healthy.

So the story is complicated. It takes a lot of research. I spent days at Hollywood Park, before it closed. The Park hosted an event, called Rail Birds, for race fans. You had to show up at 7:00 o'clock Sunday morning. Rise and shine, race fans!

The morning I went, some twenty fans and I were treated to talks by trainers and touts and a free breakfast. It was great. We walked across the tracks, both grass and dirt, as I recall, across the infield to the stables. Jockeys and hot walkers, grooms and exercise riders--all the people who lived in the world of thoroughbred racing--ate in a cafeteria. And we ate with them.

The food was great and cheap. They had pizole and menudo, tacos and burritos. Wonderful. We ate next to a table of jockeys, tough strong athletes who mostly weighed less than 130 pounds and made their living riding thousand-pound animals running full-tilt at 40 mph.

The research was fun. The horse racing world is rich and complex.

The point is this: How do you make this story exciting when Sonny is not a cop?

More later. Gotta go.

Thanks for reading.

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I'm back. Still thinking about Suzie. What makes a cop story exciting is the built-in conflict and danger.

In "Maggie Collins," the main guys, Dupree and Maggie, are after a serial killer who picks up hookers on Times Square (1986) and forces them to tell him they love him. If he doesn't believe them, well, you know what happens. It isn't pretty.

But this is a different story. As they say. The question is, should it be a thriller? Or should it just be a story about a middle-aged man seeking the family he once lost?

Or is there a way to combine the two?

I have the characters, and I have the setting. Now I have to decide what kind of book it's going to be.

More later.
Stay tuned.
Thanks.

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Back again. I think I've got it! Or it's got me.

I think I have figured out how to make this a mystery/thriller and at the same time explore Sonny's character and his relationship with Cody, who becomes a kind of surrogate daughter.

Whee! Wish me luck.
I will let you know as it goes along.

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Jan. 11, 2019

Back again. More about Suzie Sunshine.
I may have to change the title.

I was in a writers' group one time, and after I read the opening of a story, one of the other writers said, "What's new and special about this story?"

I hadn't thought about that. But I think it's a good Q. We don't like to read the same old story, over and over. Unless it's from a writer we love.

In this story, about Suzie Sunshine, we have an older man, bereft and alone, who has lost the two people he loved most in his life. His wife had an affair, and that violated his sense of right and wrong. So he threw her out. Now he is trying to find out what happened to his daughter who ran away when she was 16, ten years ago.

If she is missing, the central question is, Where is she? And, Why is she there? Is she all right? So the Q is about geography and Suzie's backstory.

But if something happened to her, if she was murdered, suddenly the stakes are different. The question is, Who did it? And, Why? Where are they? Do they deserve to die for what they did?

It seems to me those stakes are more exciting, and the story becomes more powerful.

What is new to me is that I cannot recall a story like this.

More later.

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I am trying to take my own advice, in "How to Avoid Getting 'Lost in the Woods'," posted here on 11/29/18.

I am trying to set up a plot-point to drive toward in each chapter.

In Chapter One, Sonny is trying to figure out what kind of people he is dealing with. Are they good people? Can he trust them? Are they dangerous? Are they criminals?

He watches Cody Chase with her BF Kenny and his brother Bob. Cody seems OK, but the two guys, not so much.

I always thought the detective in crime fiction is in the same position we are all in when we deal with new people.

We may move to a new town, or take a new job, or go to a new school. We need to figure out who is reliable and whom we can trust.

There is a certain amount of tension, or suspense, built into this situation. In fiction, it's the set-up. And it's called the set-up for a reason. It sets the reader up for the story to follow.

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Jan. 16, 2019

I find that, a lot of times, the fiction I write has something to do with my own life.

The story 'Suzie Sunshine' is a kind of father-daughter love story. It's about a man who meets a young woman and in a way falls in love.

He doesn't want to have sex with her. He wants to protect her and nurture her. He wants her to have a good life.

So, when she gets involved with an abusive man, it is all he can do to keep from killing the abuser. I feel that way myself.

Recently, I met a young woman about the age of my grandkids. I liked her a lot and sort of fell in love.

So I know what that feels like.

There comes a time in life when you feel you can tell who the good people are, men and women, boys and girls.

And you want to protect them. That is what this book is about. I think. So far.

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Jan. 18, 2019

I am starting over with this story and trying to establish the voice and the tone.

I am hoping the story itself will lead me where I need to go, or where it needs to go.

I know Sonny is looking for Suzie, his daughter. I wrote some notes in which he knows what happened to her. But now I am not so sure.

With all this talk about outlining and knowing where the story is going, I really don't know.

I can feel Sonny's feelings and live in his world. Maybe that is enough. Maybe I don't need to know everything yet.

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Jan. 22, 2019

I am reluctant to charge forward into this story without knowing where I am going. I've done that before and gotten "lost in the woods," as I have written about here before.

So I made a list of alternatives:
1. Sonny finds Suzie and she is a hardened criminal. Was he responsible for how she turned out? Can he stop her? Will he? Or will he join her?
2. Suzie is dead, murdered. He looks for her killer. Will he find justice? Or revenge? Did she deserve it?
3. Suzie is alive when he finds her. Then she gets murdered. Who did it? Or whodunit? And why?
4. Suzie is happily married, with children, but wants nothing to do with him. Her whole family gets murdered. OMG!
5. He finds her and she is in an abusive relationship. He rescues her.
6. He finds a series of woman in abusive relationships to see if she can find Suzie and her abuser. He rescues them, one after the other. Does he kill their abusers? Should he?

I don't know.
What do you think?

So back to square one:
What is the story problem?

Possible story problems:
-- How do you find your daughter after ten years? How did she turn out? Is she still alive?
-- You finally find a trace of your daughter, and she has been murdered. Who did it?

I don't know. It has not gelled yet.

More later.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being on Goodreads.

# Jan. 22, 3:18 p.m.

I'm back. The story problem now is:
How do you find your long-lost daughter who has been missing for ten years?

Who cares? I'm not sure I do.

I like these characters, and I like the set-up:
Sonny, an old horse trainer, comes to L.A. looking for his daughter Suzie, who ran away ten years ago.

But what is the central dramatic question?
In other words, why should we care?

What are we going to experience that is exciting?

What are we going to learn that applies to our own lives?

Beats the poop outta me.

One of my old screenwriting teachers at UCLA, Frank MacAdams, used to say that you had to have a protagonist and an antagonist.

The protagonist had to want something worth fighting for, and the antagonist had to try to stop him or her.

Hmmm. OK. Maybe.

If so, who is the antagonist here?

More later.

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Jan. 23, 2019

In an earlier draft, I had a bad guy who could be our antagonist: Don Castillo, a wealthy horse owner who lives on a big fancy ranch up in the mountains north of Mexico, D.F.

What if I recast him? Recreate his character? What if he is truly evil?

This is the hardest thing about writing thrillers: creating an interesting, charming, believable, and somewhat sympathetic villain.

Why sympathetic? Only the worst thrillers have villains that are one-dimensional.

The best villain in all modern thrillers, IMO, is still Hannibal Lecter. He is charming, erudite, well educated, an accomplished doctor, a connoisseur of fine wines and rather odd food.

His relationship with the protagonist, Clarice Starling, is interesting. They understand each other. At one point in "Silence of the Lambs," Lecter says he won't come after Clarice. "The world is as more interesting place with you in it," he says.

My guess is that Thomas Harris spent years developing Hannibal Lecter. He was not invented in a flash. At least I could not have done that on the fly.

So far, what worries me about Don Castillo is that he seems to be a cliché.

So how do I make him more rounded, more complex, and more interesting?

Hmmm. A topic for further study.

I will say the best villains believe they are doing the right thing. Or say they are.

And some people believe them.

More later.

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Jan. 24, 2019, 12:12 a.m.

I'm back. Been thinking about Don Fulgencio Castillo. I think I am on the right track. Gonna make him larger than life, charismatic, charming, wealthy, successful, and apparently a really good guy.

Everyone admires him. On the surface, he is admirable. But underneath, he is not such a great guy.

What does he do? Raises and trains polo ponies. This is truly rarefied air in the horse world.

Polo is a blast to watch. I recommend it. Gonna try to see some polo matches myself this coming spring and summer.

What is the essence of evil? I think it is total selfishness, caring about no one but yourself, doing nothing for anyone else unless it is a manipulation.

Remind you of anyone in the news or in your life? We have all known people like this.

It always amazes me that they can be so successful.

More later.

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Jan. 26, 2019

I have spent the last four days--an enormous amount of time, for me--thinking about this character, Don Fulgencio Castillo, and making notes.

He is based on rich people I have known, as well as people I have read about. He is part fictional, part factual, part fantasy. Partly, he is based on a man I heard about from a friend. She was an airline flight attendant who picked up a man on a flight to Mexico, D.F.

She lived with him on his ranch in the mountains north of Mexico City. Famous bullfighters and horsemen would come to visit. Things would happen.

I don't want to give away too much.

At times, I am more interested in him than I am in my main character, Sonny. Partly, that is because Fulgencio is new and because I have never spent so much time on this kind of character before, the heavy, the villain, the antagonist.

In earlier novels, I wanted to discover the character as I wrote, as things happened, as the plot unfolded. That is the way I wrote Maggie Collins. Now I wish I had spent more time on the bad guy and on the plot. I'm proud of the book, but still.... You know. I have a writerly obsession with perfection. True of every artist, I think.

Now, with Suzie Sunshine, I'm trying to figure out the sequence of events, aka the plot. An old friend of mine, a best-selling mystery writer, did what she called a running plot outline. She would plot the story, chapter by chapter, scene by scene, as she wrote it.

My mind doesn't work that way. I am dreaming up the characters and then setting them at play in this fictional world.

For me, that is fun.
You always hope it is fun for readers.

More later.

Back to my notes, back to dreaming up the character. What does he want? What drives him? What kinds of choices does he make? What is he willing to kill for? To die for?

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being on Goodreads.

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Feb. 1, 2019

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. Seems fitting. I am going over and over my ideas for this novel. My life feels like that movie, except I am not falling in love.

You are probably sick to death of hearing about Suzie Sunshine. Me, too. Sick to death. But I can't afford to give up.

I am wrestling with ideas about the story and about Don Fulgencio Castillo, who is supposed to be Sonny's nemesis.

In the last draft, Sonny goes to Mexico to find his daughter Suzie. I had not been in Mexico in some years and felt unsure about setting the novel there. But I forged ahead. Good idea, I think now. (You can do a lot of research online these days. And, since this is fiction, you can just make up stuff.)

In my writers' group, years ago, one of the other writers, David, said, "I hope he doesn't go all the way to Mexico and find her dead."

Oops. That is just what I had planned.

In that draft, the story seemed to meander until it ran out of energy, like a desert creek that narrows to a trickle and then finally dries up in the sand.

What do I like so far? Sonny and Cody.

Do I care about Suzie? Of course, I have to care about her, because she is the MacGuffin, the whole point. Here is a link to explain the word MacGuffin:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dicti...

My problem with the whole novel, up to this point, including 20 drafts and 13 pages and 3,629 words of notes, is that there is not enough suspense.

The search drives the story, but there must be barriers, difficulties, and dangers to make the story compelling, to give the story life.

In the beginning, nobody is in danger. Do I have to have danger to get the hairs to stand up on the back of my neck?

Yes.

How do you feel about that?

I went back and looked at one of the great-granddaddies of modern thrillers: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," or, as I call it, The Girl with her Tattoo Draggin'.

Even though the writing is mostly exposition, which is dull to slog through, the plot is relentless. A small mystery leads to a bigger mystery and leads the two main characters into danger.

So how do I do that, with this story?

I have all kinds of ideas. Maybe Castillo knows Sonny is coming and sets a trap.

Maybe Suzie is held captive there. Or maybe it is more interesting if she can leave but chooses not to. Maybe she has a vital reason.

Dum-dee-dum-dum.

Trying to build suspense.

Will Sonny find Suzie? Will he rescue her?

I have no idea.

More later. Wish me luck. I will need it.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being on Goodreads.

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Feb. 6, 2019

I have been struggling to save my previous writing in this novel. But it's hard to do that and write something new that works better.

I asked a friend of mine who is also a professional writer. He says if a story has serious problems, he starts a new draft and doesn't even look at the old ones. If he reads an earlier version, like me he falls in love with his own writing and gets trapped in endless revisions that never work.

It's hard to mix the new with the old.

Also, I have a friend who works in Hollywood doing all kinds of special effects and other work, including carpentry, explosions, electricity, and special effects.

He rigs cars to blow up and catch fire. He rigs buildings to explode. He rigs doors to blow open by violent explosion.

He told me one time that it is easier to build a new house and wreck it than it is to build a wrecked house, although the movie will only show the wrecked house.

The same thing is true writing novels. It is easier to write a new draft, starting from scratch, than it is to fix one that is structurally flawed.

So I am starting over, with two novels, Suzie Sunshine and "The Prince of Newport," which is a story for another time.

Thanks for reading and thanks for being on Goodreads.

RA