I had to get a security clearance for a job I held in the ‘90s. One of the questions was whether I’d ever been fired from a job. I had, and there were a few reasons, mostly my fault for being unable to adjust to a newspaper management and ownership rooted in an earlier generation, if not an earlier century. Partly the management worried about a defamation suit against the paper if I publicly or loudly referred to a reporter being swatted on the ass as an assault. It wasn’t, management said. “He was just trying to cop a feel,” one of my bosses explained.
The reporter was still at the paper, and I was still coming to terms with my departure from the paper and from journalism, so I focused on a different aspect of my separation in a way that left the investigator struggling for something to put down on the form. I got the clearance, and at one time I could tell you what the designation was. “T” followed by a digit maybe? It allowed me to look at pieces of paper mostly.
It also planted the idea of someone needing a security clearance and being afraid it would expose an old secret. The novel I wrote was named, not surprisingly, “Clearance.” The payoff was the investigation exposing another secret, pedestrian but a surprise to the subject. It needed, at the least, a rewrite, but a marital separation and a political career got in the way.
Those two issues were the inspiration for the second novel I wrote, originally titled “Pipeline.” The narrator’s marriage was ending while he was in the middle of a contentious municipal issue. One friend read it and commented that a pipeline didn’t seem like that divisive an issue. Those were the days, huh? I eventually renamed it “The Roses Don’t Ask.” Renaming wasn’t what it needed. It still needed a rewrite, and I still didn’t know how.
Somewhere in there I found the notes from a murder trial I’d covered in 1984. I didn’t know enough people then who knew the people involved enough to make it a serious conflict of interest, but just enough to wish it had all turned out differently. I got my wish when I rewrote the story to make it come out the way I wanted. “Vonnie Sue” was as good as the novel after it was bad. “Do Diligence” became “Lazy Man’s Load” became “Surface Tension.” That’s when I created Mickey MacNamara, who went on to star in “Midnight’s Broken Toll.”
“Midnight’s Broken Toll” is the one I put on Amazon this week, in paperback and Kindle. Various things delayed it since I finished the first draft nine years ago. One of those was coming up with what I saw as a necessary sequel. “Midnight Savings Time” was the first try, but it was too dependent on clever dialogue and two characters I created for contrast turned out too much alike. George Higgins could write novels that dialogue-heavy, so this one might have worked as “The Friends of Mickey MacNamara.” I still don’t know how to rewrite, but I completed “The Special” last month after starting from scratch in the fall. It’s a better sequel.
For a long time, I thought the need for a sequel was what delayed “Midnight’s Broken Toll.” Eventually I realized how many other factors there were. Writing other things was one obstacle: Blog posts on StillNotSleeping; Gonzo memoirs “Eating the Bait” and “Too Authentic”; “January Song,” a novel named for a song. The biggest obstacle was what all could go wrong. What if nobody wants to read it? What if someone says something mean about it? What if it doesn’t sell any copies? What if my memory for phrasing caused me to inadvertently steal someone’s words? What if there’s a typo in it?
Those fears won’t cause me to lose any sleep. I was an insomniac anyway. And Deb will still love me, and still encourage me to write more, and still be patient when I suddenly have to write something. So the worst that can happen, really, is that typo I mentioned.
I don’t know how many people will want to read it, or want to read “Vonnie Sue,” “January Song,” or “The Special” when I get them out in the coming months. I don’t know how many, but I imagine they’ll fall into three groups. There will be those who read it and say nothing. There will be those who like it and say so. And there will be those who want their money back. Maybe I’ll make a contribution to the food bank to cover the third group.
If there’s a topical theme to “Midnight’s Broken Toll,” it’s that all politics is personal. The more universal one is that the reason you wish you hadn’t done something isn’t always the reason you shouldn’t have done it. Either one works. I hope people read it and enjoy it and maybe think about it or learn something from it. That’s all a writer can ask for.