Larry M. Coleman

Almost nothing got published to the blog in January. It’s not dead, and I’m not, either. In fact, things got better than ever.

I picked up whatever strain of flu was going around this year, and it was nasty and long-lived. I had it for a week and a half, then got over it for a few days, then got it again for about five more days. With how many things I try to accomplish at once, I can handle a few days of interruption, but almost two entire weeks of lost time means everything falls so far behind that things collapse. In order to catch up, I’ve had to jettison some things temporarily, and since the blog is a labor of love that takes up a lot of time to write properly, it was one of the things that had to make way for a bit. So that’s the worst of times.

Now for the best of times: at the beginning of January the first novel was accepted for publication. That means that instead of the series being something that will come out someday, it’s something that will start this summer as both a paperback and an e-book.

It’s titled Ride On, and is the book that introduces the core cast of characters. In it, two men (one a recently-retired pro cyclist struggling to adjust and the other a millionaire with a shadowy past) and a dog (a seemingly-spoiled and haughty border collie) set off on bicycles on a treasure hunt. Along the way, they meet an injured veteran who is on her own journey in the opposite direction. Set along Route 66 in the American Southwest and inspired by the real-life treasure hunt of Forrest Fenn, it is an adventure that has a heavy dose of humor inside its themes of love, loss, and redemption. It’s contemporary/upmarket fiction with a bent toward literary, but I keep the action moving with an emphasis on character interaction through succinct dialogue, while also allowing it to take a breath and let the desert setting be part of the plot.

In November, I published a short passage from it alongside some thoughts about the process of writing it.

I spent a lot of January with my head buried in the manuscript. Although I was already on revision 13, which means at this point I’m just futzing and fiddling around because anything that needed to be changed already has been sometime throughout the last dozen passes, nothing makes one say, “I have to read all 500+ pages of this all over again” like knowing that the words are actually going to go out into the world.

I decided to go the hybrid publishing route. This gives me the support I’d get from a traditional publisher, but also allows me much more creative control than I’d have otherwise. I don’t write short books, nor do I ever intend to, so I want the final say in what stays in the books and what goes.

When someone finishes one of my books, I want them to be left with the feeling that they went on an adventure, not a straight-line whizzing by the world on the freeway, but that’s hard to do nowadays when 80,000 words is considered “longish.” Ride On is 160,000 words and it’s not even the longest in the series (book 4 is 240,000 and book 5 is 200,000). Although books like that are commercially viable (the last four Harry Potter books ranged between 170,000-260,000 words; all of the Game of Thrones books are over 290,000 words; and 3 of the 4 Lord of the Rings books are over 130,000 words), it’s extremely difficult for a debut author to break through with a large book. But two of my favorite books ever, The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude, are reasonably close to the word count of Ride On and neither of them seemed large to me, or to others who loved them.

I also don’t write about the things everyone else writes about. I find interesting, off-the-wall things that interest me, then build a story around them. Ride On was inspired by a famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it), real-life treasure hunt mashed together with one of my favorite activities, virtual cycling. The second book combines another real story, that of the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda who fought WW2 for decades after it was over, with the absolutely crazy Barkley Marathons. The third is a tale of revenge against a cult leader who is a combination of David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Heaven’s Gate. The fourth is about betrayal that arises from pure motives and is intentionally designed to mirror the structure of one of Akira Kurosawa’s most famous films, Rashomon. The fifth is the fictional autobiography of Eileen who (unlike almost every female protagonist in the last thirty years) tells her story of growing up as a privileged ballerina at an expensive boarding school before joining the Army. Instead of being another cookie-cutter badass Girl Boss who put in zero effort to get there, she actually shows weakness and—unlike Rey the insta-Jedi from the forgettable Star Wars movies—had to work her tail off to succeed.

These are all things I want to retain creative control over: I don’t believe in them despite them not fitting the mold of modern publishing, I believe in them precisely because they don’t.

I’ll be getting the blog back up to its 5-days-a-week routine over the course of February, and I’m sure there will be more news about the new book soon.