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I recently received an email from Kate P., asking when my latest Thomas Black would be out. Fear not, when my next book is published, I will announce it prominently on this website. I will scream it to the heavens.
The bad news? It’s going to be a while.
Let me explain. Most manuscripts take anywhere from nine months to eighteen months from date of submission to publication date. I have yet to turn in Monica’s Sister. In fact, I’ve yet to complete it, although it should be done in thirty days or so, depending. At that point I will submit it electronically to my agent, who will read it and make a pronouncement of some sort:  She likes it; she doesn’t like it; it needs some work; it’s just fine. Then, together, we will decide where to submit it. According to my last contract with them, Ballantine Books has right of first refusal, so they will obviously get the first look.
After the book lands at a publisher and a contract is signed, the editor will begin work. This editor will — within months, never weeks  — do what is called a line edit. I will then receive his or her edit and go over the changes and suggested changes. Then another editor, the copy editor, will do the same and I’ll go through the same dance a second time. Later, we get the page proofs from the printer and we read and correct them, mostly for typos. Somewhere along the line the publisher holds one of their quarterly meetings, where the book is presented and the sales force gets their take on it. A cover is commissioned and approved. Somebody writes cover copy. More meetings.
With traditional publishing, all of this takes months.
If we can’t find a deal we like with a traditional publisher, and I rate the chances of that high to awfully high right now, I’ll go electronic from the getgo and the book will be out on Kindle and Nook, etcetera, within a few months.
If anybody has a pricing structure for a new e-book, or ideas about pricing, I would love to hear it. If we go e-book, I’m determined to keep it below ten dollars, but I’m also seriously considering not violating the five dollar barrier. What would you pay for a Kindle version, or Nook, of the latest Thomas Black? I would like to hear your thoughts on this. Please use the comment section so others can see your views.

This reminds me of a critique I got on Amazon for my last book, Cape Disappointment. Somebody wrote that the Kindle price on the book was too high. They more or less implied that I, the author, was greedy. Note to the uninitiated: when dealing with legacy publishers in New York, the author has no say over the price of his or her books, not in any format. The author receives a percentage of the cover price, but the cover price of all editions is dictated by the publisher. This is not true when an author publishes in e-book format and skips the legacy publishing world altogether, a more common occurrence these days than ever before, but one that I haven’t yet pursued.

It's hard not to love this place. Mount Rainier in July. It was even more spectacular than it looks here.

I remember years ago reading a story about one of my then favorite writers, John D. MacDonald, who wrote over seventy gritty thrillers with titles such as The Brass Cupcake and  A Bullet for Cinderella. He also penned a series about a character named Travis McGee where he used a color in every title; Nightmare in Pink, Pale Gray for Guilt, The Long Lavender Look. Wonderful titles. Wonderful books, too, though some of the language and attitudes seem dated when read now. Not his fault. He didn’t have a time machine. He wrote the first three Travis McGee books quickly and they were put out within months of each other. The thinking was that if one was to start a series, it was good to get some product out there right away and get the readers hooked.
Oh, yes. People get hooked on a series. Once a reader finds some characters they don’t mind spending time with, they want to return. Familiarity breeds . . . well, familiarity. The majority of mystery authors write at least one series. The mystery format is perfect for the notion since the framework of a mystery doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for exploration of the main characters. That means in a series, the main character or characters can be developed in a more leisurely pace over the course of several books.
My first three Thomas Black titles came out within a year and a half of each other. This wasn’t by design, but by accident. I wrote The Rainy City and by the time it was purchased, I’d already completed Poverty Bay and was well into Nervous Laughter. The Black series got a fair amount of free publicity and thus was launched as gracefully as possible. I believe it was the first really popular Seattle PI series in quite a while. The Seattle Times gave the series a boost with several articles about Black and about me. With the fourth title, Fat Tuesday, Adams News Service, a local and now defunct distribution company, turned the Black series in regional bestsellers. At the time, I didn’t truly appreciate how lucky this was for me.
Then, in 1999, using my background as a Seattle firefighter, (retired in 2010 after 32 years) I moved on to other things and wrote a series of thrillers centered around firefighters. . The time gap between Catfish Café and Cape Disappointment, numbers eleven and twelve in the Thomas Black series, was just over ten years. During that span I received many requests for more Thomas Blacks.  Disappointingly, there were even people who refused to read the fire thrillers. “I’m waiting for another Black,” they would tell me. So, I was always going to write another Black. It was just a matter of when.
We’re in a depression, arguably the greatest depression of our lifetimes. My stepfather lived through the first depression in the thirties and I believe this one has already been as unkind to him as that one was.
During the depression in the thirties, genre fiction got a toehold in the American psyche. Mysteries were particularly popular. I don’t think this was an accident. Mysteries have several things going for them that serve the populace in times of stress, not the least of which is that they tend to order a disordered universe. They put things into perspective. After all, they center around death and death is usually worse than anything we’re going through in our own lives. Also, in most mysteries, good wins out. Justice is forthcoming. When you can’t have it in life, you grab it in fiction. I had long thought if and when this country was plunged into another depression, it would be time to write mysteries.
So, as a writer and as an avid reader of other people’s work, I find myself gravitating towards mysteries again. And towards a series. Thus, I’m hard at work finishing up Thomas Black #13.

“The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine.”
- Abraham Lincoln

One of the best days of the year was spent hiking up at Sunrise on Mount Rainier. The wildflowers were prolific and awesome and the day simply splendid.

I’m currently finishing up the polish on a Thomas Black. I have no publisher lined up and no real plans as to which publishers I will approach when the time comes to market the thing.
I’m putting the finishing touches on Thomas Black # 13 and enjoying the process very much. For the most part, I find I enjoy writing a book as much as I enjoy reading a book. True, the process of writing, for me, is tortuous at best. I have friends who write a book straight through, cleaning and polishing as they go along, so that when they get to the final chapter, the book is nearly finished, maybe a week of polishing and then it gets sent to their agent. Oddly enough, one friend who writes this way claims he hates the actual writing. I love the actual writing, though it is a long and winding road. Others dash off a book in thirty days. I could dash off a book in thirty days, but you wouldn’t want to read it.
A good book, for me, is a book that has a certain balance between the language, the use of English, and the storyline. In other words, the craft counts. Good craft doesn’t always show, but it makes a huge difference in the end product. Every reader doesn’t feel that way and certainly, as stated earlier, neither does every writer, but I do.
I don’t know any other way to do it. I try to write the kinds of books I would like to read. I’ve known writers who write for an imaginary reader, some imaginary reader they’ve locked into their minds as “the typical reader,” but I simply don’t know who that person is and more often than not, neither do they. The best writers, I think, write for themselves. If their taste is catholic enough, and they are not too weird to bring empathy to themselves, others gravitate towards their writing, too. I know who I am, what I like and what I’ll read, so I work to that. Given those parameters, I’m amazed and sometimes puzzled by who my readers turn out to be. Most are women. But then, most readers of novels in this country are women. By and large, men’s brains have gravitated to sports, TV, video games and other pursuits. On the other hand,  a lot of couples  read my books. That is good.  I rarely read the same books my wife does and vice versa.
I write my books straight through, polishing as I go, and then I go back and start from the beginning, do the whole thing again, rewriting endlessly. I don’t stop until I can’t make it any better. For me, that takes a long time and a lot of rewrites, many, many drafts. I am not a good first-draft writer. If you saw the first drafts of anything I’ve written you would agree. But I do have the tenacity to continue with rewrites until I get it more or less right. A writer friend once asked me why I put myself through all that agony. She dashed her books off rather quickly, got them published to reasonable acclaim, and thought I was wasting a lot of time. Maybe so. She reads my books, or claims to. I cannot get through hers.
A mystery writer friend and I were talking once about popular fiction and I mentioned a very popular mystery writer, someone who’s still working and asked if he’d ever read her. “I read a paragraph once,” he said, as if that was all that needed to be said.
“Why only a paragraph?” I asked.
“Because I wasn’t interested in reading a whole book by somebody who was capable of writing that paragraph.” I’ve never forgotten his words, probably because in some measure, I feel the same way –  and fear the same criticism.
Needless to say, for this man, the writing itself was part of the pleasure in reading. Ironically, the writer he was criticizing is still going great guns while he has long ceased to be published. Perhaps this is related to their writing styles, or lack of same. I think maybe not. A lot goes into making somebody a bestseller, not the least of which is some consistent good luck, which he never had and she encountered in spades.
I like to read people who, among other things, write sentences I wish I had written. If I can read an entire book without finding one of these, it’s likely I won’t come back to that author. It is possible to write a really good book without any quotable lines, but rare, I suspect. One person who does a pretty damn good job of it is Michael Connelly. His prose is practiced, polished, and deceptively simple.
So, once again, I continue to write draft after draft, let the paint dry, go back and look at it the next day or the next week, and rewrite it once again. One thing I have going for me now is I’m no longer working for the Seattle Fire Department, having retired last September. So I’m working six days a week and am rarely tired, cranky or sleepy while working. The books should come faster and easier. So far this one is.

Next: why a Thomas Black now? And why the big gap in time?

I’ve finished repairing the damage done to this website and I’m working on an article about writing and the thirteenth Thomas Black. It should appear sometime the first week of November. Nothing earthshaking, just some of my thoughts on writing and publishing.

I’m still cleaning up some problems created by installing a new version of WordPress. I thought my site got hacked, but an alert reader told me it probably happened when I was installing a new version of WP. I think he was right. I’ve got most of it fixed but there are still some problems.

By the way, if you live in the northwest, I think the premier site for general weather information is Cliff Mass’s blog. I go to it several times a week. He includes a podcast from his Friday series on public radio where he explains recent weather patterns. You can find it here: Cliff Mass Weather Blog.

I recently received this:

need a book….PLLEEEASE!!

I came to Seattle three years ago, your books were a welcome introduction to areas of Seattle to which I had become familiar. I greedily read every book I could find at Central Library, and requested any other EE book available through the library (sorry, no private
library in my backpack). I have waited and waited for a new book to come out,
and I have read many other authors, but none capture my attention as you. Please
finish your latest work, and please please please do everything possible to
bring out a few more new books very quickly after that!!! I promise I will
recommend the read to anyone looking for a Seattle book, or a good
suspense/mystery.   I am glad to see that all of your titles are available on Kindle now!

Susan H.

Susan: I’m working as quickly as I can. I spent close to two years on a book I’ve now put aside. Sometimes that happens. Writing is a craft but there’s also some magic to it and sometimes the magic simply does not happen. I am now going great guns on a Thomas Black. It’s going well and I expect it to be finished early this winter. After that, I’m planning two or three more Thomas Blacks in quick succession.

As far as the Kindle versions go, I’m not so sure about that. Some of my books are in Kindle, but not all are.

This picture was taken on our trip down from Sunrise on Mount Rainier this summer. Wearing the helmet is my longtime friend and state hillclimb champion, Garth Ferber. We rode in the mountains for about four hours, got 7500′ of climbing. And no, I couldn’t keep up with the hillclimb champ.

I’m still hard at work on Monica’s Sister, the working title for my new Thomas Black. I should finish by the end of the year. More later. Click on photo to enlarge. By the way, the proliferation of wildflowers was so stunning I drove up a week later with my wife, and we did some day hikes in the area. Awesome.

Dear Earl,

How is your work on Order 17 coming along?

Yours
Edd

Dear Edd,

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now. Order 17, the book I worked on for nearly two years, has been temporarily shelved. Some writers might use that term for a book that will come out at a later date, but I’ve never gone back to a shelved book and finished it. In other words, Order 17 has been round-filed. It rarely happens that I start a book and fail to finish it. I don’t think it’s happened to me in the last twenty years, at least not that I can recall. I won’t bore anybody with why I’m not finishing Order 17 or what went wrong with it. It’s the nature of the business that at times large swaths of a writer’s life are literally thrown away. As my mother would say, “Tough tittie.”
The good news is I’m two-thirds of the way through the first draft of a Thomas Black mystery, a book I’m very excited about. I’m going to write mysteries only for a while. My thinking is that the country and the world is in bad shape and things seem to be getting worse every day. Fewer people are reading. The Internet and other new gadgets have blotted up a lot of free time that was formerly spent reading fiction. No fiction author I know of is immune to this. Thus, I’m writing a Thomas Black and plan to write two or three more in quick succession. If I can work things out with the new publisher, I will try to bring out a new book more often than one book per year, which has been the industry standard for years, and my habit. More on this later.

ee

This is exactly the sort of letter/e-mail every author wants to receive, written by a thinking person who actually understands what I was trying to do with the book. Every once in a while I’m lucky enough to get one of these. Thanks, Barbara M.

Dear Mr. Emerson,

There are a few dozen authors whose work I cherish and collect, and you’ve been one of them for years.  But I’ve never felt moved to write to one of my favorites til today.  I have to thank you for what you’ve accomplished in writing Cape Disappointment.

I’m one of the huge number of thinking people troubled by anomalies and discrepancies in our common experience  – open questions where discussion is absolutely prohibited, whole groups of people saying, “But what about this?” dismissed as lunatic-fringe “truthers”.  And of course I’ve been wondering at both the precision timing and the instant spackling-over of the Wellstone “accident” ever since it happened.

You did SUCH a remarkable job of presenting the unpalatable reality in which we sure seem to live these days, while also defusing the inhibitions about paranoia and “lunatic” conspiracy theory that keep us from even thinking about it.  I am full of admiration.

Using Bert as the vehicle for Black’s wrestling with his own anti-paranoia programming, and thus walking the reader through the walls of their own, was simply brilliant.  And your understated prose style was so perfect for the exploration of this rant-inducing topic  –  I can’t think of many other people who could have pulled this off.  Plus you still managed to make it a really good mystery read, not a polemic.

This can’t have been easy to write, or to live with  –  thank you for doing it.  I’m thinking that I will probably be buying and giving away copies for awhile  –  you’ve done such a solid job of making the case for the truth, and fiction makes a much better carrier than nonfiction when a big change in thinking is required.

This book is a huge gift to America, and maybe also the only justice Paul Wellstone will ever get.  Thanks for it.

Sincerely,
Barbara M.
Port Angeles, WA.