Well, I\u2019m not, anyway.<\/p>\n
I do have writer friends who can produce a book (or more) a year no matter what kind of crisis is hitting them at home. Contracts pull them through. That, and stubbornness. I couldn\u2019t work with so much pressure; I\u2019d feel like I was on an assembly line….<\/p>\n
I was recently at a party and someone asked me what I was working on. I said, \u201cNothing. I published my 25th book last Fall. I\u2019m taking time off.\u201d He looked at me like I was a slacker or something. But that\u2019s not an unusual response.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been a member of the same health club for over two decades and lots of people there read my Nick Hoffman mysteries set in a college town not unlike East Lansing. No matter when I publish a book in the series, someone will always ask, \u201cSo when\u2019s the next one coming out?\u201d<\/p>\n
It could be the very same week there\u2019s been an article in a local paper or a radio interview. Really. As if I\u2019m churning them out on an assembly line with the help of a team of research assistants.<\/p>\n
And if I don’t have news about another book in press, I often get blank stares. What\u2019s wrong with me, am I lazy? seems to be the unspoken assumption.<\/p>\n
Okay, publishing 25 books in different genres over the last 25 years isn\u2019t shabby \u2014 but they haven\u2019t come out on any sort of regular basis. Some years I haven\u2019t published anything and one year I published three different books just because that\u2019s how the publishers\u2019 schedules worked out.<\/p>\n
In case that sounds like I\u2019m Type A, I should explain that my second novel took almost twenty years to finish. Yes, twenty, working on and off because I kept re-conceiving it. I\u2019m glad I did, because The German Money got one of the best reviews of my life. The Washington Post compared me to Kafka, Philip Roth and John le Carr\u00e9 \u2014 and I was sent on book tours in England and Germany to promote the editions published there.<\/p>\n
But some books took me only six months to write from concept to completion for various reasons. And another book was fairly easy to put together because it was a collection of already-published essays and didn’t need extensive editing. So it\u2019s all highly unpredictable.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t explain that to the cheerful guys who call you \u201cDude!\u201d and ask about your next book while you\u2019re on the way to the showers just wearing a towel and flipflops. Or people who decide to chat with you while you\u2019re sweating on the treadmill. Or the people who think that popping out another book can\u2019t be that difficult since it\u2019s not like I have a real job, anyway.<\/p>\n
Maybe I should ask them, \u201cSo, when are you doing your next brain surgery?\u201d or \u201cWhen\u2019s your next super-messy divorce case?\u2019 or \u201cWhen\u2019s your next multi-million dollar real estate deal?\u201d<\/p>\n
Nah. I\u2019ll just blog about it, or write them into my next book. Whenever.<\/p>\n
Lev Raphael teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, I\u2019m not, anyway. I do have writer friends who can produce a book (or more) a year no matter what kind of crisis is hitting them at home. Contracts pull them through. That, and stubbornness. I couldn\u2019t work with so much pressure; I\u2019d feel like I was on an assembly line…. I was recently … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263,2],"tags":[497,5,95,1521,165,809,498,166,197,19,496,290,214,380,1219,495],"class_list":["post-3976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writers","category-writing","tag-authors","tag-books","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-fans-author-fans","tag-inspiration","tag-lev-raphael","tag-memoirs","tag-motivation","tag-mysteries","tag-novels","tag-publishing","tag-the-writers-life","tag-the-writing-life","tag-writers","tag-writewithoutborders-com","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3976"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5531,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3976\/revisions\/5531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}