Lucky 7

I've been writing for a very long time.

In the fifth grade, I wrote a short story called The Hiccuppy Monster. It was about a monster that had the hiccups and couldn't shake them, and a few friends suggested ways to get rid of them. It took a kid scaring him to end his hiccupping fit.

One friend came up with the idea, another friend drew the illustrations (he was quite talented), and I wrote the story. Our teacher liked it so much that he had me read it to kids in a couple of first-grade classrooms.

In the sixth grade, we had creative writing each week, and my teacher, Bill Townsend, encouraged me to challenge myself. He liked my writing so much that at the end of each week, he'd have me read my work to the rest of the class. He told me that if I chose to be a writer, I'd do well.

Bill Townsend was one of my most influential teachers.

In my late teens, I continued to write short stories. This was at a time that I devoured spy novels by Len Deighton, and when I created Roland Axam. I was inspired by Deighton's Game, Set, and Match trilogy and thought I would write an entire novel for Axam.

My first novel was a spy thiller called The Spy's The Limit. It featured Axam, in Berlin, as an agent with the Canadian Security Intelligence Services. He was assigned to assist his controller, Charles Townsend, who used to work for British MI-5 and who, himself, had been invited to bring a long-time agent back to the west, from the Soviet Union. Townsend had been in charge of the West Berlin portfolio and was the only person the agent trusted.

Axam was to be an observer only, but Townsend had other plans. I won't tell the story because I don't want to spoil any surprises, should I ever revive that story.

I actually turned The Spy's The Limit into a trilogy, taking Axam from Ottawa to Berlin, from Berlin to North Berwick, Scotland, and back home. When I finished the third book, Clear Spies Ahead (the second book was called Spy Will Be Done), I read everything, from cover to cover.

And wasn't happy.

I felt the story was too simple and not believable. I decided to shelve the trilogy and maybe revisited it after I had more writing experience under my belt. But I had completed three novels.

Sadly, in the moving that DW and I have done over the years, I've lost the manuscripts. I was upset but figured that perhaps I wasn't meant to be a spy novelist.

I moved on to another novel soon after. It was about teenage suicide. JT was about a teen, Joseph Thomas Smyth, in his final year of high school, and deals with the pressures that face youths. Written from the viewpoint of JT, it follows his last two weeks of life.

This novel, I thought I could get published, so I sent it to several publishing houses. Every one of them rejected the story with a lovely form letter that essentially told me to fuck off. But one of those letters was covered in hand writing around the margin, apparently by the person who actually read JT.

The person said that she actually enjoyed reading my manuscript, felt the main character compelling, and was touched by the emotion the book set. And while her company wasn't interested in this type of story, she encouraged me to keep writing.

Four books written: zero published.

The next novel that I wrote was started in 2001, after DW and I had returned from South Korea, where we taught for two years, and after we bought our first house and started a family. The book was based on our experiences in Korea but as seen through my eyes.

I should note here that all of my short stories and all of my novels were written in first-person prose. Though my sixth-grade teacher never encouraged this writing point of view, it was something that interested me.

Also, none of my books have happy endings. I just don't like them. Sorry.

It took me more than 10 years and three iterations to complete my fourth novel. I eventually brought Roland Axam into it, as the main character, complete with a sad backstory, and made him the person who experienced the things that I had while living in Korea.

Plus some fiction, for good measure.

That book did get published, although it's self-published. It's Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary.

Five books written: one published.

When I wrote Songsaengnim, I initially planned to write it to cover the span of my two years in Korea. But as the story progressed, I realized that the book was getting long, so I decided to split it into two stories: one, the first year of Roland in Korea, with his backstory as a second arc; the second story would follow Roland in his second year, where he teaches at a university.

I also decided to add parts of The Spy's The Limit—or at least what I could remember of the lost manuscript—as a secondary arc. There are actually three arcs in Gyeosunim, the sequel.

I got about two-thirds through writing Gyeosunim before I lost interest. It took 10 years to finish Songsaengnim and I didn't want to take another 10 years to write the sequel. I was bored of the characters in the main arc and needed to do something different, so I shelved my work.

For now.

Five-and-two-thirds books written. Let's say six.

My seventh book is Dark Water and is my first murder mystery, which is a departure from my other books. It's my first book that is not written in first-person prose (it's in third-person) and it's one of the few books that doesn't feature Roland Axam (JT is the only other novel that is Roland-free).

I have friends who think I'm a novice writer. Heck, I have friends who sometimes forget that I'm a writer (even though I worked for 25 years, writing documentation for various companies). I do lack confidence in my writing ability but I look back to my fifth-grade teacher, who liked The Hiccuppy Monster so much that he had me read it to younger kids (and I think he kept the only copy of that story), to Mr. Townsend, who encouraged me to write, and to that unnamed reader at a publishing company, who told me not to stop.

I'm having a lot of fun writing Dark Water and think it is probably my best work yet. Maybe, it'll be my Lucky 7.

Happy Friday!