17Jan

3,697 Days (and Counting)

• Saved in: Amazon Kindle, Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome, Book Promotion, Chris Orcutt Books, Craft, Ebooks, Fiction Writing, Personal Essay, Process, Rewriting, Typewriters, Workspace, Writing Experiences, Writing Life, Writing Tools
• by Chris Orcutt
• with Comments Off on 3,697 Days (and Counting)

For over ten years, or 3,697 days to be exact, I’ve been work­ing on a nov­el about teens in the 1980s. The nov­el even­tu­al­ly became so long (over a mil­lion words, and twice the length of War and Peace) that I had to split it into nine books or episodes.

The result, Boda­cious­ly True & Total­ly Awe­some: The Leg­endary Adven­tures of Avery “Ace” Craig, An ’80s Amer­i­can Teen Epic, dra­ma­tizes the lives of Ace and his friends in a rur­al-sub­ur­ban high school set­ting. (By the way, it’s much bet­ter than I’m mak­ing it sound; I’m ter­ri­ble at con­dens­ing my mil­lion-plus words into book jack­et copy.)

I wrote Boda­cious­ly to be a sto­ry for and about my generation—Gen X—a gen­er­a­tion that has long been unap­pre­ci­at­ed, mar­gin­al­ized, and mis­un­der­stood. I wrote it to give peo­ple my age an escape back to a sim­pler time, a time when all of life was ahead of us and we didn’t have the inter­net, AI, track­ing, and algo­rithms in our lives. I wrote it to give the younger gen­er­a­tions (and future gen­er­a­tions) some idea of what it was like to be a teen in the mid-1980s. And I wrote it for read­ers, not critics—for peo­ple who just want an enjoy­able book that keeps them read­ing.

For 3,697 days (with the excep­tion of 47 days; there were a hand­ful of bouts with ill­ness and a few short vaca­tions), I’ve wok­en up and writ­ten and/or revised a cou­ple thou­sand words, work­ing an aver­age of 10 hours per day. I wrote the ear­ly drafts with pen­cils or type­writ­ers,  and I iso­lat­ed myself, stay­ing off the inter­net and only lis­ten­ing to music and watch­ing movies and TV shows from the 1980s. And, with the excep­tion of my wife and Muse (who han­dled the busi­ness side of things and read the penul­ti­mate drafts of each episode to give me feed­back) and a tal­ent­ed graph­ic design­er Vic­to­ria Heath Silk (who designed the book cov­ers), I did all of the work myself: writ­ing, edit­ing, book design, type­set­ting, proof­read­ing, ebook cre­ation, pro­mo­tion, etc.

I did all of this work in less than ide­al con­di­tions, in ad hoc work­spaces, in spite of numer­ous envi­ron­men­tal dis­trac­tions. Even when I wrote in the far­thest recess­es of the base­ment gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments room of Vas­sar College’s Thomp­son Memo­r­i­al Library, I still had to con­tend with a cer­tain annoy­ing woman nois­i­ly pass­ing my remote cubi­cle dur­ing her morn­ing “con­sti­tu­tion­al” through the library. For five years, I lived next door to a woman (who clear­ly had OCD) who used a leaf­blow­er on her prop­er­ty start­ing at 6:00 a.m. for hours straight, and for the sec­ond five years I lived in a com­plex where the only tools the build­ings and grounds guy knew how to use were a snow­blow­er and a leaf­blow­er. Despite these dis­trac­tions (and many, many more includ­ing solic­i­tors at my door, pow­er out­ages, bro­ken hot water heaters, bro­ken bones, and deaths), I kept going.

I did all of this while bat­tling depres­sion and men­tal ill­ness, often ris­ing at 3:00 or 4:00 o’clock in the morn­ing, pray­ing and med­i­tat­ing, ask­ing the uni­verse for the strength to keep going and guid­ance on what to write next, and bat­tling the grem­lins that told me dai­ly when I first woke, “What the f‑ck are you doing, Orcutt?! Nobody’s going to want to read this sh‑t! Nine books and 1.2 mil­lion words about teens in the 1980s?! Who gives a f‑ck? Peo­ple are going to hate it. You should go back to writ­ing Dako­ta and Svet­lana mys­ter­ies. All right, maybe a few peo­ple will love it, but there are going to be lots of critics—especially with all the teen sex you have in these books. What are you, dude, dis­eased? What will your loy­al read­ers think? What will your moth­er think? What about all the peo­ple who are going to write to you and com­plain?”

Every day, for 3,697 days, I bat­tled these voic­es, and every day I even­tu­al­ly ignored them and sol­diered on. I was inspired to keep going by my wife and a cou­ple of great friends and rel­a­tives (they know who they are), but most­ly by two quo­ta­tions that I framed and hung on my office wall:

“It always seems impos­si­ble until it’s done.”
—Nel­son Man­dela

“There are just cer­tain human beings able to put one foot in front of the oth­er relent­less­ly, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly able to do it, where­as oth­er peo­ple would fail.” *

There were many, many days when I want­ed to quit, when I want­ed to throw my type­writer out the win­dow, when I was sure I couldn’t write anoth­er word. But it was nev­er in me to quit, and the words just kept com­ing. A mil­lion and a half of them before I start­ed to cut them back.

I’m not telling you all of this to puff myself up, to say, “Hey, look at how amaz­ing I am by work­ing through this stuff and fin­ish­ing this gar­gan­tu­an book!” I’m telling you this because I’ve been work­ing on some­thing for over ten years, and now it’s time to pub­lish the books, and I’m look­ing at what I’ve done and I can’t believe it. How can some­body work on one thing for 3,697 days? Where did this sin­gle-mind­ed obses­sion of mine come from? Am I more men­tal­ly ill than I thought? Is the result going to be worth it? Will read­ers like it?

I’m encour­aged by the ear­ly reviews of Boda­cious­ly by pro­fes­sion­al review­ers and read­ers on Net­Gal­ley and Library­Thing. About 80% of the review­ers have loved the book, about 10% have thought it meh, and about 10% have hat­ed it. But, of the read­ers who have loved it, the con­sen­sus is that I’ve cre­at­ed “a time machine” back to when­ev­er the read­er was a teenag­er. One review­er wrote a review so encour­ag­ing that I print­ed it out and post­ed it on a bul­letin board in my office. A bold­ed sec­tion reads,

Guess what? Chris Orcutt has it dead on. He pegged my teen years.

I think the most dis­com­bob­u­lat­ing thing going on here is this: after 3,697 days of work­ing, of mak­ing each sen­tence, each page, each chap­ter, each book the very best I can make it; after a year of pro­mo­tion, reviews, adver­tis­ing, inter­views and more, it’s out of my hands. I’ve done all I can do, and that’s a hard thing to accept when you’ve been work­ing on some­thing for one-third of your career and one-fifth of your life.

I’ve done all I can, Dear Read­er, and now the rest is up to you.

The fate of Boda­cious­ly is in the hands of Read­ers Like You: buy­ing the books, read­ing the books, review­ing the books, and spread­ing the word about them.

I’ve done my very best, and now I have to let them go.

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Boda­cious­ly True & Total­ly Awe­some: Episode I, Bad Boy is avail­able at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and your local book­store.

(The LEGO mod­el of the Space Shut­tle above was built by my clever nephew Aydin Mahoney.)

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* From Beyond the Edge, the doc­u­men­tary about Sir Edmund Hillary and Tens­ing Norgay’s sum­mit­ing of Mt. Ever­est in 1953.

Tagged: 1980s, Ace, Amazon, Avery "Ace" Craig, Avery Craig, Bodaciously, Bodaciously True and Totally Awesome, Chris Orcutt, decade, Kindle, novelist, Orcutt, perseverance, typewriters, writer, writer's life, writing life, writing process

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