Tag Archives: S.O.R. Losers

Read something funny

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S.O.R. LosersNow that you’re looking through the bookshelves at Grandpa’s or Aunt Eileen’s for something funny to read, you might try S.O.R. Losers, a tale of a soccer team that does not win. On my website, I often share the “story behind the story.” Here’s what I said about S.O.R. Losers:

“As noted in the entry for Bright Shadow, I am often asked “How long does it take you to write a book?” The answer is, about a year. But it can vary. A lot. S.O.R. Losers took me one day to write. It has never happened before, or since, and I don’t think it’s likely to happen again. How did it happen in this book? When I was in high school I played on our school soccer team. I was goalie. We were terrible. How terrible? We never won a game. My own kids—who had become good soccer players—loved to hear how bad their dad—me—was. So I told them many a story about how we always managed to lose. They thought it very funny.

“One day I decided to write it all up as a novel. Since I had—in a way—practiced telling the tale of our terrible team so often, it just flowed out, game by game—in one day.”

Is losing funny? Read the book and let me know.

This writer’s day

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This writer’s day: Up at six, and by six-thirty (with coffee near) working on new book, focusing on the last third. Chat with my publicist about evolving website. An e-mail from the editor of forthcoming book, Sophia’s War, informing me that she is sending the first pass galley. For the first time I get to look at the book in print, always something of a shock, always satisfying. More coffee. We spend an hour and a half going through the book—she’s the leader here—adjusting words, sentences for clarity, deleting repetitions, confusions, what have you. Vital to do. Good editors do this well. Then I go off to the local library to get advice on retrieval of newspaper archives, for information I need for new project.

An hour’s break (a 3½-mile walk). Back home (more coffee).

S.O.R. LosersI work on an old text, S.O.R. Losers, which has been reformatted for inclusion in Breakfast Serials, the newspaper serialization-publishing venture. An e-mail from a different editor, with encouraging words about first 100 pages of that new project. It is energizing, so after dinner, back to that project.

Finally, happily, reading time, a book about Edgar Allan Poe. Always a fascinating subject. One of my books, The Man Who Was Poe, is about him. A long, but productive day.

The writer’s fundamental contradiction

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Bright ShadowIt usually takes me a year to write one of my novels. Sometimes more, sometimes less. The longest time period was fourteen years, for Bright Shadow. The shortest period was one day, for S.O.R. Losers. There are explanations for both extremes, but I will save them for another post. Readers, however, are welcome to read the books and see if they can see why. My current project has been two years in the making. The first effort was not very good, and required extensive rewriting. Why was it not very good? In essence, it was too close to my personal experience. Which is to say I was not able to take what was real and meaningful to me, and make it real and meaningful to readers. This flies in the advice often given to young writers: “Write what you know.” The problem of course, is the writer’s fundamental contradiction: A writer must be objective about personal experience to make it a subjective experience for the reader. Never easy.