Louis Shalako
I’ve often said that a fate worse than death might be
to find yourself marooned on a desert island, with nothing but your own books
to read.
There’s a grain of truth there.
But last fall and in the early winter, I went on a
binge of throwing out old books. I’d read most of them fifteen or twenty times.
Some of them were simply falling apart. I kept a few books, also very much
read, but the sort of books I might want to read, one more time. Some of them are falling apart too—a bit of a chore
to read when lying in bed, but I couldn’t give them up just yet. Those are
mostly art books.
The other night, I was getting a bit desperate. Not
quite ready to take up William
L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich, or one or two comparable tomes, I finally did the unthinkable.
I went to the short row of my own proof copies, there
in a bookshelf in the hallway, and took out something I wrote a few years ago.
It’s under a pen-name, it’s about sixty-five thousand words, and it was my
first attempt at a thriller. I don’t even have the full set of my own books.
(Lately, I don’t bother, but I do use various spell
check programs to check my proofs, as well as preview on Amazon, Createspace, etc. Also, the damned things cost
money, you can’t sell them and they’re full of errors anyways.)
What’s interesting, is that I read sixty pages that
first night, before putting it aside and falling asleep.
Three or four years later, I couldn’t really say if
this is a good book, or how it might compare to a more traditional product. What
I can tell you, (bearing in mind it
is a proof copy and that corrections were made), is that it’s okay. There are
sections that seem a bit muddled—places with a bit of repetition.
There are typos, missing words, and quite a number of
sentences that might have benefited from having that one last clause cut.
The
sentence was just too long, and that last bit did nothing to add clarity.
I can also say that the characters are okay, insofar
as that goes. The story is pretty good, inspired by Alistair Maclean, Jack Higgins, Robert Ludlum, and a
hundred other thriller writers. There are some long and descriptive passages, ones
that could be shorter. There is a long, introspective driving scene, where the
thoughts pile up and it is probably, once again, just too long. There are some things, many things, which I would probably
tend to avoid, with a few more books under my belt.
There are parts where I laughed out loud, and since it
has been a long time since I wrote it, a few surprises as I simply forgot basic
bits of the story. The structure seems good.
So. It’s not a perfect book, and the final product
probably isn’t perfect either. I think I had to write that book, in order to
write the one after that, and the one
after that, and so on and so forth. I
had to write a few books in order to learn the craft. To develop as a writer.
I had to make a few mistakes. I had to risk embarrassing
myself, and trust me, that does happen.
I think there is some
sort of learning curve, not the least of which is to learn how to finish
what you start, to throw it aside, to begin the next one, and more than
anything, not to take it too seriously.
Because if you listen to the critics, or even to your
own doubts, we would never do a damned thing, would we?
End
(So, Louis. What book are we talking about. – ed.)
(No comment. But if we’re ever marooned on a desert
island, this one wouldn’t be so bad. – Louis.)
Thank you for reading.
