Four Days At the Page

I decided to take the long Thanksgiving weekend as a writer’s retreat — a retreat from the world. I wanted to spend the whole time working at editing and polishing The Old Mermaid’s Tale because it is my hope to have it to press by the end of the year and released by Valentine’s Day. I think that is a good release date for such a deliciously romantic story by someone whose name is Valentine anyway. It was four days of mixed emotions.

The bottomline on this book is that I love it. I live the story, I love the characters, I love the settings, I love everything about it. But I am also getting tired of it. I have been working on it in some form or another for close to fifteen years.

I wrote the original draft when I was still living in Marblehead— living in a big, glass house on a rise overlooking the ocean. The room I worked in had sliding glass doors from which I could see all the way from Salem Harbor up to Gloucester Harbor and out to sea past Baker’s Island. There were three real lighthouses within view and one fake one. The three real ones — Salem Lighthouse on Winter Island, the Baker’s Island Lighthouse and Gloucester’s beautiful Eastern Point Light flashed as I worked. The fake one was directly across the water in Manchester-by-the-Sea and was built during the second World War as a lookout for German submarines. I don’t know if they ever saw any or not.

That first draft — which was actually a long short story — got a lot of criticism from a couple of people and caused a major rift between a friend and I. Well, to be honest, the rift was long overdue, the story just set it off. But I put it away and didn’t do much writing for the next 5-6 years other than technical stuff.

After I moved to Gloucester I got involved with a small writers group, the one that eventually turned into the Hovey House Writer’s Group and, I finally dug that manuscript back out and went back to work on it. The next incarnation was successful enough to get me the attention of a New York literary agent who praised it to the skies, offered me a contract and then never did much with it. Thus began three years of getting overly experienced with New York literary agents and all their flattery and lies. Maybe not “lies” but misrepresentations for sure.

Anyway, after several years of that and a few years of gaining experience in publishing, I decided I would do this through my own press if only to get it out in the world so I can move on to other projects. In many ways I wish it had worked out with one of the publishers the novel was (I am told) pitched to but in other ways I like having control of it. Whether it will sell is quite another matter.

But spending four days alone with these characters was intense. They are all integral to my life in many ways and I find that I think about them and dream about them as if they were friends I actually spend time with. In the midst of this I received an email from my friend Ray, complete with photos, of his first trip ever to Niagara falls. I found this particularly delightful because possibly the most romantic scene in the whole novel takes place in Niagara Falls when Baptiste and Clair have a brief reunion there. I had just been looking at the Falls web cams and thinking about the weekend I spent there with a lover that inspired me to write that particular scene.

So it was a good and productive four days. I have a bit to go but I feel now that I have made enough progress that I can finish up in a couple more weekends. Then it is time for a final review by editorially-savvy friends and ready for press. I can’t wait.

Thanks for reading.