Writing

“Old Flames” is Splendid Cold War Crime Fiction

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Scotland Yard’s Inspector Troy isn’t your typical cop. His roots are Russian, his brother’s a baronet, he owns a mansion, and he sees England in 1956 through a very particular lens.  Though his father urged him to “play the game” and learn how to be English, he doesn’t care about cricket or football–or what people think of him either. His wry observations about post WWII-Britain, its feckless leaders, its people and how they speak are priceless:

“Troy loved ‘stands to reason’–it was, when used by a certain kind of idiot, specially bred by the English, the signal, the preface, to the preposterous to a statement that would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, be quite devoid of reason.”

A surprising pair of leaders starts the book on its long and compelling voyage into crime: Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin.  They’re respectively the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Premier though Khrushchev is truly in charge and bullies his comrade.  The men are on a deeply boring whirlwind state visit, and because Troy speaks Russian, he’s been assigned as one of six members of a British security team.  All of the men secretly speak Russian and the government hopes that they’ll  catch the communist guests saying something worth spying for.

Troy is assigned to Bulganin but in a powerful and comic scene insists on accompanying Khrushchev.  His interactions with “K” are surprising, entertaining, and move the book forward at breakneck speed before Troy actually gets to investigate any murders. This is a delicious choice that Lawton’s made because it goes so much against the crime novel formula of finding a corpse in the opening pages–or at least the opening chapter.

And speaking of corpse–I was delighted to learn that in England that word can be a verb.  According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it means “to start laughing in a way you cannot control during a performance, or to make someone else do this.”  That actually once happened to me in London at a performance of a P.G. Wodehouse adaptation where I laughed so hard I slid out of my aisle seat.  The actors saw me and cracked up too, followed by the whole audience.

The verb corpse is apparently used by actors and performers, again er the Cambridge Dictionary, and it fits this novel perfectly because for Troy, being British is a performance.  You might find yourself corpsing yourself at the antics of Troy’s busybody twin sisters Masha and Sasha.

Lawton has been compared to John Le Carré and that’s not remotely hyperbolic.  His work is richly layered, beautifully written, and has a sense of majesty.  His ability to capture the atmosphere of a period rivals Alan Furst’s and Troy’s irony reminds me very much of Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko  series.  That’s a hell of a combination.

Old Flames is a novel to savor, offering a window into another world that couldn’t be more real and compelling.  There were many lines and even whole scenes I had to re-read because they either made me laugh or because they were so perfectly realized I was in awe of Lawton’s skill.  Lawton’s minor characters are Dickensian, and that even includes an athletic pig.

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, Bibliobuffet, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations in Michigan.  He’s the author of the Nick Hoffman mysteries.  His mother was born in St. Petersburg and her father was in the first Russian Revolution and escaped the Bolsheviks with his wife and infant daughter.

Review: Goth Girl, Interrupted

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★★★★

Agnes Corey isn’t your typical New York editorial assistant.  She hasn’t earned a degree in publishing, didn’t go to a ritzy college, and her past is “a story of abandonment, foster homes, petty crimes, and state institutions.”

She works at a near-bankrupt Manhattan legacy publisher that hasn’t had a best seller since the early 1990s and is likely to be swallowed up by a conglomerate. That might explain why even as a probationary hire, she’s grossly underpaid, earning much less than the current real-life average salary for her job.

Corey is troubled, vulnerable, poor, plagued by nightmares and memories of her mentally ill mother. Adding to the misery is being so broke she can only afford to live in a crummy hostel until luck and daring take charge of her life. She’s hired to help a famous, reclusive author of a very Gothic novel adored by millions, the novel that put her publishing house on the map. Fans have been ravenous for more content from author Veronica St. Clair, a sequel to be exact, because the first book had an ambiguous ending.

The mansion Corey comes to at night and in the rain (of course!) is like every castle or mansion from Anne Radcliffe through the Brontës to Shirley Jackson and beyond: eerie, overwhelming, oozing menace and mystery. Even better, it was once a mental institution and like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it seems a bit mad itself.

The author name checks plenty of celebrated Gothic works, and the novelist’s name even echoes the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert.  Goodman deftly deploys time-tested Gothic tropes: scary scenery, shadows, the damsel in distress, exploring dark corners, paranoia, claustrophobia, imagined phantoms, dreadful weather, real and misplaced fears–and of course the house that seems like a brooding, malevolent being.

The author can even make the West Village in Manhattan seem creepy and mysterious–at least at night.  She also writes good satire of the publishing business while giving it the ironic hipster appeal of vinyl and flip phones.

As the novel develops, Corey’s nightmares are so intense that they bleed into her everyday reality, in part because she’s a sleep walker. When she starts taking dictation from the reclusive author whose life might echo the storyline of the original best seller, is that fact or fiction?  Is she a remotely reliable narrator?  If she is, can we trust Veronica St. Clair?  The novel more and more feels like a Russian nesting doll as stories keep appearing within other stories.

Readers may either be fascinated or thrown by the way the book slowly drifts into a tale of drugs and Goths in New York whose soundtrack could easily be Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. And the focus on Corey’s dreams can sometimes feel excessive.  For a deeper immersion in the Gothic style, I highly recommend Sarah Perry’s brilliant, beautifully-written novel Melmoth which revisits the 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin and turns it inside out.

Lev Raphael spent his senior year of college reading all the classic Gothic novelists, some of them in period editions.  The author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery, he has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other outlets. His most recently published short story “Lost in London” is a Gothic ghost tale.

England’s Medieval Game of Thrones

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While history buffs are likely very familiar with the Norman invasion of England in 1066, they might not know as much about the preceding half century and this epic book fills that gap.

It was a time of violence almost beyond belief, though it might remind readers of early 1900s pogroms in Russia and October 7th in Israel. Raiding Vikings from various countries as far away as what became Poland weren’t satisfied with just burning Anglo-Saxon towns and cities to ash–even if they’d received gold and silver as ransom. They raped women and cut off their breasts, threw victims into fires to burn alive, speared babies to death or smashed their skulls, and hanged men by their privates when they weren’t beaten, clubbed, or hacked to death.  The survivors often became slaves.

Strife seemed almost constant, with Anglo-Saxon and Viking armies “marching back and forth and up and down the length of England for years, each time inflicting punishment on whatever unlucky locals got in their way, for not having sufficiently resisted the previous conquerors.”  And as if that wasn’t bad, in Normandy, nobles were known to “tear each other to shreds and destroy themselves, for they lust after rebellion, love sedition, and indulge willingly in treachery.”

In both countries, alliances between factions and families could shift with stunning speed, oaths were followed by betrayals that were followed by promises of fealty, exiles and returns were as common as brothers having their own brothers murdered and treasuries raided. Feuds simmer and erupted and died down again, only to savage a new generation.

In these sometimes hellish landscapes, castles were besieged and destroyed and rebuilt, farms were burned, cattle slaughtered, and danger and death were omnipresent–and likewise disease, since the Anglo-Saxons had no understanding of hygiene. They used water riddled with garbage, human waste, and animal corpses. “Random death was so common in England that the Anglo-Saxons had a word for it, aelfscot, ‘elf shot,’ struck down by an invisible, otherworldly arrow.”

And among the various kings, lords, and chieftains on both sides of the English Channel (or “The Southern Sea”) there were plots, coups, murders, betrayals, assassinations and enough violence to make the series Vikings look like something from the Disney Channel.

Parallel to all this madness and dislocation was the quiet, steady, painstaking work of monks copying manuscripts in scriptoriums, work that was encouraged by Alfred the Great to save such treasures for posterity. That very human impulse to save learning and wisdom is both touching and fragile, because raiders had no use for books and loved burning them.

There’s what seems like a cast of thousands here and the names like Aelgifu are hard to scan, but the author does a decent job of individualizing people and separating legend from fact, as well a immersing you in a period that is at times both familiar and utterly alien. Hollway is especially good at charting the changing names of places from Latin to Danish to Old English and Modern English, helpfully explaining the roots of those names. All the same, the fusillade of names can sometimes be exhausting, especially when someone has two or more different names. And there’s way too much speculation about what people might have done or said or felt. 

Beyond that, this book that has two main faults, both of them inexplicable: there are no maps and no genealogies whatsoever, so it’s hard to picture where cities, counties, and countries are located when they’re mentioned, and hard to remember who’s related to whom–and how.  ★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and other news outlets as well as for several NPR radio stations, one of which hosted his interview show with guests like Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong.

 

Ukraine Then & Now

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If you want to understand the conflict in Ukraine and go behind the headlines, there’s no better place to start than Anna Reid’s Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine. Deeply researched, elegantly written, totally enthralling, the book explores the history of Ukraine  back to the Vikings and how Ukraine and Russia have followed completely different paths.  

Unlike Russia, which became an autocratic empire, Ukraine has been ruled and misruled by Poland, Lithuania, Austria-Hungary and of course Russia.  A key to the current slaughter of Ukrainians and the seizure of vast swathes of territory–as well as what sounds like crazy rhetoric on Russian talk shows–is a profound Russian delusion about this country that hasn’t been independent very long but has an undeniable historic existence, culture, and language.  Reid notes that historically Russians have regarded

Ukrainians as really just a subspecies of Russian…Any differences that did demonstrably exist between them were the artificial work of perfidious, Popish Poles–replaced in today’s Russian imagination by the meddling West in general.  Rather than attacking Ukrainians and Ukrainian-ness as inferior, therefore, Russians deny their existence.  Ukrainians are a “non-historical nation,” the Ukrainian language a joke dialect, Ukraine itself an “Atlantis–a legend dreamed up by Kiev intellectuals”…The very closeness of Ukrainian and Russian culture, the very subtlety of the differences between them, is an irritation.

That was written in the 90s; now the irritation appears to have turned to seething hatred.  

Blending history, personal exploration, and interviews, the book is unique because it is divided into two parts: the first was published in 1997 90s when a democratizing Russia under Yeltsin seemed highly unlikely to attack its neighbor.  The second, of course, was written after Putin launched his “special military operation” at a time when Russia seems like a fascist state to many international analysts–and certainly to Ukrainians who have experienced fascism under the Nazis.

Reid doesn’t pull any punches exploring Ukrainian antisemitism and pogroms or the country’s lack of readiness to face up to the truth the way Germany has done about the Holocaust.  Nor does she whitewash past governmental and cultural corruption.  Reid is especially adroit at discussing how Ukrainian nationalism has been growing stronger and investigating the role of the Ukrainian language in a country where many people have been bilingual and Ukrainians have Russian relatives and marriages are often “mixed.” 

If you’ve read Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, Reid’s book is a perfect companion piece, vitally important work that has been superbly edited and updated. ★★★★★

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery and his work has appeared in over a dozen languages.  He has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and a handful of public radio stations.

Classic War Novel

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If you caught the recent Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front and wondered about the book it’s based on, don’t hesitate to get the handsome Everyman’s Library edition. You’ll see why it’s considered one of the greatest war novels every written and more than that, you’ll be amazed at how it doesn’t sound translated.  The prose is that clear, that vivid, that compelling. Translation, bringing a book into another language and its culture, is an art and this version of the book is incredibly artful.

The story is simple and complex. Paul and his German schoolmates are basically bullied into signing up for the German army by their jingoistic teacher.  However patriotic they are, life in the trenches changes them utterly. 

Life and death aren’t topics to read about and discuss: they are both majestic and ephemeral. You can be killed at any minute by a sniper, an artillery shell, a mine–or crushed by a tank. Conversely, you can miraculously escape death by stepping out of a bunker for a smoke or an errand. 

The fear, the tension, the horror of seeing people die in myriad grotesque ways are like an acid bath.  The dark realizations hit him early and hard:

“We are no longer young men.  We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world.  We are refugees.  We are fleeing from ourselves.  From our lives.  We were eighteen years old and we had just begun to love the world and being in it; but we had to shoot at it.  The first shell to land went straight for our hearts.  We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress.  We don’t believe in those things anymore; we believe in the war.”

Paul experiences one horror after another, loses friends, is wounded, has to kill or be killed, and one of the most amazing chapters of the book is the time he’s trapped for three days in a shell crater with a dying man.  But there are also surprisingly moving and even comic moments of camaraderie as he and his fellow soldiers bond around incredible events that soon become ordinary.

The novel is short, fast-paced, devastating and seems oddly current, given the network of trenches that Russia has built in occupied Ukraine.  Anyone interested in the history of WWI or amazing fiction should read this book. ★★★★★ 

Lev Raphael’s introduction to WWI was via a classic, The Guns of August, which he read one summer between sixth and seventh grade.  He recently learned that his paternal grandfather, murdered at Auschwitz, fought in that war.

 

 

Tribute to My First Editor

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The famous New York editor who helped launch my book publishing career, Michael Denneny, is dead. He was a founding editor of the highly influential magazine Christopher Street, and in 35 years at Macmillan, St. Martins Press, and Crown published major authors like Edmund White, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Buckminster Fuller while championing gay fiction and nonfiction.

I’d been publishing stories for over a decade before approaching this giant of LGBTQ publishing at St. Martin’s Press with a collection of gay stories, but he thought it was incomplete. He knew my work and asked, “Why don’t you bring all of yourself into the book: you’re gay, you’re Jewish, and you’re the son of Holocaust survivors. Nobody has ever written a book quite like that.” He was right, and we launched a beautiful partnership when he offered me a contract for the book that became Dancing on Tisha B’Av.

That book put me on the map, with dozens of reviews across the country and the Lambda Literary Award it won the year after publication. I’m the figure on the cover. I was doing heavy weights at the gym and Michael thought pairing my body with a skull cap would hit the right notes. It did. Another well-known editor, the late George Stambolian, told me it was “the cover of the year.”

 

Denneny had started at St. Martin’s Press in 1977 when there wasn’t a single mainstream publisher in New York bringing out gay books.  He soon became celebrated as the doyen in that field for hardcover originals and his line of Stonewall Inn Editions, handsomely produced paperbacks of gay fiction and nonfiction.

Michael was an amazingly hands-on editor. He had me bring copies of dozens of stories to New York and we sat on the floor in his bohemian living room and looked at what might fit, what could be left out, what order the stories should take to seduce and enthrall readers. But that wasn’t the end: he and I spent easily seven months after that going back and forth with revisions as he helped me hone each story to make it as clear and forceful as possible. It was a master class in editing and revision, and his insights were never short of brilliant. He’s one of the many editors who have helped me enormously in my career as a teacher and editor myself—and one of the best.

Here’s an example of his help: I had shied away from writing sex scenes, but he said that sex revealed a side of characters that couldn’t be known in any other way and especially with characters who were venturing into new territory, so it was important for me to follow them. I did. The book was a success, winning a Lambda Literary Award after receiving dozens of reviews, most of them adulatory.

Michael admired my sense of humor and urged me to write a mystery series with a Nick and Nora Charles feel. That’s how the Nick Hoffman mysteries were born and that’s how I started getting reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, ended up as a professional reviewer for newspapers and radio stations, got invited around the country and abroad to speak about my work, and saw professors take me on an as a subject for academic essays, papers, and book chapters.

Without Michael, I doubt that Special Archives at Michigan State University’s Library would have pursued my papers for a decade and finally purchased them for a hefty sum.

It’s not self-serving to say that his taste was superb and he didn’t just publish major gay writers, he published Ntozake Shange—and she’s the writer who apparently encouraged him to publish gay authors. I remember Michael made a prediction about my career. He said, “You might never have a best seller, but like Shange, you’ll be making a lot of money doing speaking engagements because people will want to hear you speak from your unique perspective.”

He was right. I’ve done hundreds of invited talks and readings across the U.S. and in Canada, Germany, Scotland, England, France, Belgium, Italy and Israel. Without his intense belief in the value of my work—and its quality—I might never have gotten this far.

Or felt so very grateful.

Into the Woods with Ruth Ware

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As a crime fiction reviewer, I’ve often had to say, “Sorry, I haven’t read it” when people ask me about a new book.  The reasons can vary.  I might be swamped with review copies.  I might not have been in the mood for that particular book after sampling it.  Or I might be wary of the publicity blitz around the book since I’ve seen so many crime novels over-hyped by publishers and been disappointed when they turn out clichéd or badly written.

But then it’s a wonderful surprise to pick up a book with thousands of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and discover that it truly lives up to the promotional material.  This past week I finally caught up with Ruth Ware’s gripping debut In a Dark, Dark Wood.

After an enigmatic brief prologue, the book opens in a hospital with Leonora, a heroine who can’t remember how she got there but has hands sticky with blood.  Something horrible has clearly happened.  Is she a murderer?  She’s desperate to regain her memory and for much of the book that struggle is a dark, dark thread.

How did she end up in the hospital?  Well, because she should have said no to a bizarre invitation.  Leonora, a crime writer herself, has led a solitary life for a decade after university for undisclosed reasons but readers know they’ll find out and will surely hope there’s high drama involved.  The invitation breaks into her solitude: it’s for what the English call “a hen party” and Americans call a bachelorette party.  Weirdly, she hasn’t been invited to the wedding itself and it takes some coaxing from a friend of hers and the bride’s to say “yes.”

The party is hours from London, very remote, in a big, isolated, ugly ultra-modern house.  Though it’s not haunted, it has far too many large, un-curtained windows and is surrounded by bleak forest.  Everything about it is oppressive, creepy, and exposed.  Tensions soon rise among the motley group of partiers and what seems at first to be an Agatha Christie homage turns violent and bloody.

In the second half of the novel we learn what drove her and her bride-to-be friend apart and while some of the revelations aren’t as surprising as you might wish, they fall into place in a satisfying way.  Ware is deft at building tension, evocatively describing people and places, and the book is explosive in many ways.  It’s also intriguing to read about a crime novelist caught up in a series of mysteries, a woman who might be a murderer herself.  And a woman who by all rights should have been far more wary and suspicious from the start.  When you read a Christie novel, a great deal is revealed in dialogue and readers of this novel should pay close attention to what characters say if they want to figure out what’s really going on in this taut, enticing novel.

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and other newspapers and public radio stations.  He’s the author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries.

“Stillhouse Lake” is a Perfect Thriller

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I’ve been reviewing mysteries and thrillers since the 90s and it’s been a very long time since I got goosebumps reading a crime novel. And even longer since I felt torn between rushing ahead to find out what was going to happen next and slowing down to savor and marvel at what an amazing book I was reading.

Rachel Caine’s Stillhouse Lake is that book. It’s beautifully crafted, scary and terrific in every single way: plot, characterization, style, and pacing. Hell, even the cover is creepily perfect.

Caine’s hypnotic narrator is Gwen Proctor, a woman on the run ever since her husband’s horrific secret life was exposed and led him to prison. She’s trying to protect herself and her kids from the sociopaths on the Internet who blame her for her husband’s crimes and make obscene, horrific threats. As happens way too often now, hatred’s gone viral and she’s the target of a vicious, disgusting cyber mob.

Despite the despair she sometimes feels, she’s strong, resourceful, and a very good shot. She’s turned herself into a fierce and indefatigable woman who might remind you of Sarah Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Gwen needs to be quick-thinking and strong because she’s pursued by psycho cyber terrorists. She and her kids keep having to abandon one town after another, one identity after another, until perhaps, just perhaps they’ve found a new home with people they can trust and maybe even admire.

Well, you know how long that’s going to last….

Caine avoids a trap many thriller writers fall into: her action scenes are as clear as possible without an excess word, and you always know exactly what’s happening. Equally important, she’s also a deft psychologist, capturing every single nuance of Gwen’s struggle in lean, evocative prose. Gwen’s love for her children is so intense the book practically blazes with that love. Her torment is just as intense. How could she have been so naive as to marry a man who was a heinous criminal–and not figured him out? The shame, the guilt, it’s all there, dramatized and heightened as one great plot twist follows another.

I actually read the prologue and first chapter twice because I was so blown away by the power and intensity of what Caine was doing, and by the plight of a deeply sympathetic narrator whose life may never be restored to any semblance of normality.

I’ll say it again: this is a perfect thriller. So prepare for plenty of OMG moments, and for losing lots of sleep.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries and seventeen other books in many genres.  His work has appeared in fifteen languages.

 

My First Love Was a Library

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I fell in love in second grade visiting our local library. On 145th Street in Manhattan, it was a gorgeous, imposing Gilded Age building by McKim, Mead and White, but I didn’t know its history until recently.

What I did know was that I felt excited, privileged and awed every time I passed through its portals, and believe me, it did not have doors, it had portals. The library was designed to look like an Italian palazzo. Nobody told me that, but I felt as far away as Venice every time I wandered along its endless shelves as the light streamed in through massive windows. I felt a similar sense of awe seeing Venice itself for the first time, decades later.

The library was a place of peace and complete freedom. No librarian ever told me a book was too adult for me, and neither did my parents. Which meant I could browse the shelves with no restrictions.

Each week I brought home a small pile of books I subsequently devoured, and I was especially fond of biographies and history, two genres that fascinate me even more now that I’m middle aged and have my own biography and see myself in history.

All those books nourished and inspired me. I wanted to write, too, and I wanted to have a book on those shelves some day. Here again, I was very lucky. Starting in grade school, my teachers and my parents encouraged my writing.

Yet with all that reading of library books, I still watched plenty of television. It was actually reading that interfered with my school work, not TV. Whatever I brought back from that amazing library was almost always more interesting than what we were reading in school, where I was often bored and too talkative. Nowadays, of course, they would probably give me Ritalin.

I got another gift from that library: being read to at story hour. It was the pleasures I derived from that and from having my mother read to me at home that partly fuel my own joy when I do a reading today, one of the best parts of being an author on the road.

Samuel Johnson wrote that “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.” I can’t agree, at least on a day when I’m feeling good about my career, because my own public library filled me with hope, knowledge, and dreams.

Lev Raphael is the author twenty-seven books and has spoken about his work in nine different countries at universities, libraries, churches and synagogues, and museums.  He’s published 100’s of essays, stories, book reviews and blogs, and the Michigan State University Library collects his literary papers for its Special Archives.

(this blog first appeared on The Huffington Post)

Should You Write Every Day?

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Lots of authors worry about the number of words they write per day. Some even post the tally on social media as if they’re in some kind of competition.

And if they’re not writing at least 500 or 1200 or 2000 words or whatever quota they’ve set, they feel miserable. Why aren’t they working harder? Why are they stuck? What’s wrong with them? How come everyone else is racking up the pages?

If that kind of system works for you, fine. But as an author, editor, and writing teacher, I think it can be oppressive.  Too many writers believe that if they’re not actually physically writing a set number of words every single day, they’re not just slacking, they’re falling behind and even betraying their talent. Especially when they read online about other people’s booming word counts.

How do they get caught in that kind of dead-end thinking? It’s thanks to the endless blogs and books urging writers who want to publish and stay published to write every day.  They make that sound not just doable, but the norm. Some days, though, it’s simply not possible. Hell, for some writers it’s never possible. And why should it be?

I never urge my creative writing workshop students to write every day; I’ve suggested they try to find the system that works for them. I’ve also never worried myself about how much I write every day because I’m almost always writing in my head, and that’s as important as putting things down on a page.

But aside from that, every book, every project has its own unique rhythm. While working on my 25th book, a suspense novel, I found the last chapter blossoming in my head one morning while I was on the treadmill at the gym. Though I sketched its scenes out when I got home, I spent weeks actually writing it.

Some people would call that obsessing. They’d be wrong. What I did was musing, rewriting, stepping back, carefully putting tiles into a mosaic, as it were, making sure everything fit right before I went ahead, because this was a crucial chapter. I was also doing some major fact-checking, too, because guns were involved and I had to consult experts as well as spend some time at a gun range. It took days before I even had a workable outline and then a rough draft of ten pages, yet there were times when I had written ten pages in a single day on the same book.

The chapter was the book’s most important one, where the protagonist and his pursuer face off, and it had to be as close to perfect as I could make it. So when I re-worked a few lines that had been giving me trouble and found that they finally flowed, it made me very happy. I was done for the day!

And if I didn’t write a word on any given day or days, I knew I would be, soon enough. Because the book was always writing itself in my head, whether I met some magical daily quota or not.

I don’t count how many words or pages I write a day, I focus on whether what I’ve written is good, or even if it has potential with revisions. That’s enough for me.

Lev Raphael has taught creative writing at Michigan State University.  He’s the prize-winning author of 27 books in many genres and has also published hundreds of stories, essays, book reviews and blogs.  He edits and coaches writers at writewithoutborders.com.

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