MY DEBUT NOVEL HAS A PUBLISHER

ALL THE QUIET HOURS will be out November 15th

Yesterday I got a call from an unknown number. Since I owe everybody and their dog money and I’m on a first name basis with a lot of creditors, my policy with unknown numbers is to answer the call, put the phone to my ear, and say nothing. I wait for the caller to make the first move. Each time I do this it reminds me of that super tense scene in The Departed where Matt Damon calls Leonardo DiCaprio from Captain Queenan’s cellphone the same day Queenan dies. Leo knows that it can’t be Queenan making the call, but he answers the call anyway, puts the phone to his ear, and waits… knowing that the man on the other end murdered his boss. Damon waits too, not ready to commit. It is a masterclass in the building of cinematic tension. Check it out:

So I’ve got the phone to my ear like Leo DiCaprio (except I’m way worse looking), not sayin’ much, when an older woman asks for me by name. “Who wants to know?” I demand. Turns out this woman, Sharon, is the co-founder and co-owner of VACANT CITY EDITIONS, one of Toronto’s best small publishing firms. So far they’ve only published poetry but that was never their intention. They seek to elevate new voices in poetry and prose. I even borrowed a copy of Paige Dauphine’s Forgiving Latitudes from my local library branch a few months ago.

It’s a great collection of gritty-yet-pretty poetry. Raw urban energy and imagery. If Dauphine hadn’t called it Forgiving Latitudes, I can think of a title from a particularly memorable Daft Punk video that would’ve have worked just as well.

Anyway I can’t wait to read their second collection of poetry, Xuân Thi Nguyễn’s Chém Gió. Look at that gorgeous artwork.

I mailed VACANT CITY EDITIONS my manuscript so long ago that I’d completely forgotten about it. But when Sharon called me yesterday, she asked if I’d received any offers yet. I wasn’t born yesterday, folks.

“A few,” I lied. “But I’d honestly rather go with a local publisher.”

“Well,” Sharon said, “We are both local and very interested in publishing your novel.”

I nearly dropped the phone. I’d been waiting to hear those words since I was 11 years old. So I said yes. VACANT CITY EDITIONS is a writer-friendly publisher. Authors retain their copyrights and foreign rights in perpetuity.

Once they recoup publishing and marketing costs, they split the remaining money 50/50 between writer and publisher. Most corporate publishing houses do 70/30 splits in the publisher’s favour. And that’s before the 10% taken by the writer’s agent. I don’t have an agent, but I’m currently looking for one for reasons I’ll explain below.

All the Quiet Hours falls under the “literary fiction” genre. Unless your name is Donna Tartt, Jonathan Franzen, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan or Meg Wolitzer, your “literary fiction” is unlikely to sell more than 5000 copies. Hell, I’ll be lucky to sell 1000 copies. But selling 1000 copies or less of a book that took 15 years to write is not the best way to make money as a writer. I started All the Quiet Hours in January 2009 and finished in January 2024. I write “literary fiction” at a pace that would be best described as “glacial.”

It will likely take another 10-15 years to produce a follow-up, even though I already started on it two years ago. It is a campus novel about about a disgruntled English professor who suffers a professional and personal humiliation. It’s called To the Glum Alumni and it should be finished sometime before 2040. Campus novels I’ve been reading or re-reading for inspiration include:

Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim (1954)
John Williams Stoner (1965)
Don DeLillo White Noise (1985)
Donna Tartt The Secret History (1992)
Stephen King Hearts in Atlantis (1999)
Denis Johnson The Name of the World (2000)
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason The Rule of Four (2004)
Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot (2011)
Chad Harbach The Art of Fielding (2011)

Anyway, To the Glum Alumni won’t be coming out anytime soon. So back to AtQH:

VACANT CITY wants to publish my novel as is. They have asked for no editorial changes. They simply want me to make one last pass to see if I can catch any errors of syntax, punctuation, or grammar that I somehow missed while writing, editing, and re-writing the previous 418 drafts between 2009 and 2024.

I said yes to the deal. Of course I did. All the Quiet Hours is my soul on a fucking plate, quivering and hopeful and offered up to the world. If it gets bad reviews, it won’t change my opinion of it. I did my very best. It’s a nostalgic summer epic in the style of Stephen King’s “The Body,” Dean Koontz’s The Voice of the Night, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer, and Meg Wolitzer’s unadulterated masterpiece The Interestings.

As proud of the book as I am, I nurse no delusions about its commercial prospects. It is a 750+ page debut novel from an unknown 38-year old white cis male het writer.

So since mid-2022 I’ve been working on a trio of novels featuring an acerbic FBI agent named John Redd. I’m just finishing the second draft of the first book in the trilogy, which is set in 1986-87 and is called Seeing Redd. 

I have extensive plot notes and roughly 30 000-40 000 words written for the other two books in the Redd Trilogy, entitled Burning Redd and Running Redd. It’s formulaic stuff, admittedly, but it’s so fucking fun to write and, compared to the literary approach I took with my first book, it is way easier to write.

I’ve been reading stacks upon stacks of commercially viable crime thrillers such as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series, and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

I've also been reading a lot of Tana French, John Grisham, Linwood Barclay, David Baldacci, Ruth Ware and Carl Hiaasen to get a better grasp on how these writers structure their books. The Stieg Larsson trilogy, in particular, is something I want to emulate. For whatever reason, readers seem to love trilogies, which is why I am going to try and use the Redd Trilogy to break through as a writer of popular fiction.

For whatever reason, readers are drawn to trilogies. There’s a Canadian writer named Amy Stuart who has written a best-selling trio of novels called “the Still series.”

The first book in the series is listed as Still #1 and titled Still Mine. I picked it up to see what all the fuss was about but I was astonished to find the novel relentlessly dull and completely plotless. I mean, there’s the barest skeleton of a plot and it goes like this:

A journalist with a mysterious past who is in substance recovery is hired to travel to a small town with an abandoned mine where a missing local woman was last seen. The journalist sticks out like a sore thumb, as any new person asking tons of questions in a small town would, and learns nothing about the missing woman. Absolutely nothing happens in this book except for a turgidly dull trip to the mine that resolves nothing and fails to propel the plot forward in any way. And the next two books in the trilogy, Still Water (Still #2), and Still Here (Still #3) are also bestsellers! Q: Who buys this crap? A: Future fans of my upcoming Redd series, I hope.

Here’s my point: If Amy Stuart can become a best-selling Canadian author with a trilogy of boring, plotless novels, then I stand a chance of becoming a best-selling Canadian author with my own trilogy of action-packed crime thrillers. And Stuart isn’t the only Canadian hack writer making a living off bad work. I just forced myself to read The Off Season by Amber Cowie, a book about a married couple with a kid who agree to live in a hotel during its off season. It is a shameless ripoff of Stephen King’s The Shining and the most blatant example of an idiot plot since Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Hereditary was excellent. Midsommar was bloated and plodding. I’d rather watch myself take a piss for two hours than sit through that godawful movie again.

In film and literary criticism, an idiot plot is a device whereby the story is “kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot.”  In books and movies with idiot plots, the story would quickly end, or possibly not even happen, if it weren’t populated solely by idiots.

If the idiots in Midsommar had simply bothered to google their destination, they would have learned that people who travel to the Hårga, in a rural region of Sweden, to attend the nine-day midsummer festival tend to never return. Had they known this information, they probably wouldn’t have gone to Sweden in the first place.

In The Off Season, newlyweds Jane and Dom enter into a pact to not search each other’s names on Google. Instead of seeing this for the screaming red flag that it is, a red flag that says “I have a sketchy violent past,” Jane thinks it’s romantic because she is an idiot. And don’t even get me started on her husband’s daughter, an obnoxious spoiled brat named Sienna. The only reason I continued reading the book is because I was praying for Sienna to die. Of course, Amber Cowie denied me even that small pleasure.

My point is, there are many bad books out there flying off the shelves. Now that I have found a publisher for the central project of my creative life, All the Quiet Hours, I have turned my attention to writing commercial fiction so I don’t have to keep working the shitty minimum wage jobs I’ve been enduring since my late teens. I didn’t want to commit to a career because I knew writing was my true calling. Apparently it takes John Grisham 4-5 months to write one of his annual bestsellers. The rest of the time he hangs out on beaches and boats. If I can get the Redd series into the right hands, I can knock off a Redd book in 6 months, then spend the rest of the year working on the literary fiction that is so much harder but far more satisfying to produce.

I met a Toronto literary agent who has a book on The New York Times best sellers list. He’s the guy whose hands I am currently working to get the second, better draft of Seeing Redd into.

So hopefully I am on my way to finally becoming a full-time writer. Seeing Redd will be done by the end of the summer, at which point I will start shopping it around to every agent and publisher in North America and Europe. I will do whatever it takes to not endure the daily humiliation of having a boss I despise. I want to wake up in the morning excited to go to work. I have never had a job I liked. Not one. And as the economy shifts more toward short-term contracts, outsourcing, job agencies that essentially steal your wages from you, I have less interest than ever before in participating in the exploitative schemes of late capitalism. Making it as a writer would mean more to me than winning the lottery.

As of November 15th 2024 I will finally be able to count myself among the rarified ranks of published writers.

I will now work as hard as I can to become a successful published writer.

If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just bartend till I drop dead. I’ve never written for money and I’m not going to stop writing if I can’t find a way to use my pen to procure paycheques. Yes, in addition to being the last man on Earth without a cellphone, I also write longhand, so that when I type my notebooks into Word, I’m already writing a second draft.

Wish me luck. Lord knows I need it. And check back with me in two-and-a-half months. VACANT CITY refuses to work with corporate chain bookstores but they have fostered relationships with indie shops and do a brisk business selling both physical and e-books online.

You’ll be able to pre-order All the Quiet Hours on October 15th and on November 15th it will be available in select brick-and-mortar bookstores across Canada.

In the meantime, I will continue to live like a monk. Early to bed, early to rise. At my desk writing by 5:30AM with Cookie perched behind me like a parrot. I do all my best work with my cat hanging around my neck like a living, purring scarf.

That’s the news, lose yer blues.
XOXO ;)

- Danny